Difference between big indian and little indian...

[Sir C4]

Can someone explain to me what the difference is between big indian,
and little indian? I see people talk about the need to convert between
the two... What are they?

 

[Mark Rae]

Can someone explain to me what the difference is between big indian,
and little indian? I see people talk about the need to convert between
the two... What are they?

It's when a Native American has a baby...

On the other hand, if you actually mean "bigendian" and "littleendian"...
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-28,GGLG:en&q=bigendian+littleendian&meta=

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=F6ran_Andersson?=]

Can someone explain to me what the difference is between big indian,
and little indian? I see people talk about the need to convert between
the two... What are they?

A big indian will eat more than a little indian.

I assume that what you mean is big-endian and little-endian.

They are different ways of storing a multi-byte value. The big-endian,
or Motorola format, stores the most significant byte first. The
little-endian, or Intel format, stores the least significant byte first.

If you read a file format that uses an endianess other than the one used
by the memory storage of the computer, you have to convert between the
formats.

Wikipedia: Endianess
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness

 

[Chris Dunaway]

Can someone explain to me what the difference is between big indian,
and little indian? I see people talk about the need to convert between
the two... What are they?

Wikipedia is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endian

 

[Jorge Varas]

commonly the big indian is the boss, and the little indian does everything
that the big indian say...

or you might be refering to the order in which the bytes of a word are
stored.

a word is a 16 bit unsigned integer (or 2 bytes). So one byte is called the
Most Significant Byte (MSB) and the other the Least Significant Byte (LSB).
the word value is calculated by:

value = MSB * 256 + LSB

when the value is stored in memory (or anywere else in the system) as:
MSB-LSB, then is called big indian, when is stored LSB-MSB is called little
indian.

 

[ssamuel]

Wikipedia is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endian

On the contrary, I'd make the argument that Wikipedia is a dangerous
source of information that may or may not be accurate, and those who
know little about a subject and are therefore likely to need Wikipedia
are the ones who'd probably least be able to tell the difference
between fact and fiction.

 

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

On the contrary, I'd make the argument that Wikipedia is a dangerous
source of information that may or may not be accurate, and those who
know little about a subject and are therefore likely to need Wikipedia
are the ones who'd probably least be able to tell the difference
between fact and fiction.

Wikipedia is right far more often than it's wrong in my experience, and
is more reliable than most sources of information on the web. There are
very, very few sources of information which are *always* right.

In particular, even though I'm a fan of newsgroups, I'd trust
information on Wikipedia over information from a newsgroup response in
terms of pure numbers.

Jon

 

[Brian Gideon]

On the contrary, I'd make the argument that Wikipedia is a dangerous
source of information that may or may not be accurate, and those who
know little about a subject and are therefore likely to need Wikipedia
are the ones who'd probably least be able to tell the difference
between fact and fiction.

For the most part I'm pretty comfortable with the accuracy of the
articles. The quality of the writing and the organization of some
articles could use some work, but I don't have many complaints about
the accuracy.

 

[Chris Dunaway]

On the contrary, I'd make the argument that Wikipedia is a dangerous
source of information that may or may not be accurate, and those who
know little about a subject and are therefore likely to need Wikipedia
are the ones who'd probably least be able to tell the difference
between fact and fiction.

Do you have some information that shows that Wikipedia is inaccurate
disproportionately to other sources? What sources of information do
you use that are completely accurate? The MSDN docs? Books? Before I
would have any reservations about using Wikipedia, you would have to
show me evidence that a significant number of articles were inaccurate.
I'm not saying that Wikipedia is 100% error free, no source of
information is. I think characterizing Wikipedia as dangerous is a bit
extreme.

Regards,

Chris

 

[ssamuel]

Actually, yes. On many occasions, I've read Wikipedia articles about
things that I know about, and some of the information that presented
itself as fact was opinion. There is a mechanism by which you can mark
suspicious "facts" as opinions, but that mechanism wasn't always used.
I don't fault Wikipedia's inaccuracy; I fault them for masquerading as
purely factual while there's no editorial control over published
opinions.

The sources of information that I used in all of these cases was my
past experience about fields in which I have sufficient expertise. For
instance, MSDN isn't always correct, but if I've written a working line
of code a dozen times, I know what works.

As stated, I don't use Wikipedia for subjects that I don't know enough
about to discern fact from opinion. Since the 90% of my need for
Wikipedia is to learn things in areas where I don't know enough to
discern fact from opinion, I consider it unreliable.

I regard all sources similarly, and any web site gets the same
scrutiny. If a web site isn't properly sourced and doesn't contain a
line of reasoning that makes sense to me, I consider it unreliable. My
gripe with Wikipedia is that it informally (and occasionally formally)
presents itself as more authoritative than the rest of the Internet,
while it truly isn't.

If everyone used the standards for qualifying information that I do,
there would be no problem. I'm also not trying to convince anyone to
believe me. My friends and peers have listened to my case against
Wikipedia and none of them use it anymore, some because of my argument.
Clearly, I'm not going to change the world by posting on
microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp. I'm simply stating my opinion
that Wikipedia is dangerous to the unsuspecting masses.


Stephan