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Originally posted by andersonr
Just curious if Binary is the same globally ?
Originally posted by MaskedAvatar
But the numbers spiral down the sinkhole in the opposite direction down south.
When integers or any other data are represented with multiple bytes, there is no unique way of ordering those bytes in memory or in transmission over some medium, so the order is subject to arbitrary convention, called endianness. This is actually somewhat similar to the situation in different written languages, where some are written left-to-right, while others are written right-to-left.
The two main types of endianness are termed big-endian and little-endian. Endianness is also referred to as byte order or byte sex. There seems to be no significant advantage in using one way over the other; the endianness does not matter when dealing with a sequence of single bytes. This is the case with strings encoded in ASCII and similar codes, where each byte corresponds to a single character. Strings encoded with unicode UTF-16 or UTF-32 are affected by endianness, because each set of two or four bytes represents a single character.
The two main types of endianness are termed big-endian and little-endian. Endianness is also referred to as byte order or byte sex.