2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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big-endian
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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adj. [common; From Swift's Gulliver's Travels via the famous paper On Holy
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Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137 , dated April 1,
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1980] 1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given
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multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the lowest
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address (the word is stored big-end-first ). Most processors, including the
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IBM 370 family, the PDP-10 , the Motorola microprocessor families, and most
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of the various RISC designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also
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sometimes called network order. See little-endian , middle-endian , NUXI
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problem , swab. 2. An Internet address the wrong way round. Most of the
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world follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting with
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the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the country. In the
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U.K.: the Joint Academic Networking Team had decided to do it the other way
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round before the Internet domain standard was established. Most gateway
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sites have ad-hockery in their mailers to handle this, but can still be
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confused. In particular, the address me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be
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interpreted in JANET's big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk ) or in
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the standard little-endian way as one in the domain as (American Samoa) on
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the opposite side of the world.
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