C Programming - Floating Point Issues - Discussion

What is 'big endian or little endian architecture'?

Please, give me the correct explanation.

"Little Endian" means that the lower-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the high-order byte at the highest address. For example, a 4 byte Integer

ABCD

will be arranged in memory as follows:
Base Address+0 Byte0
Base Address+1 Byte1
Base Address+2 Byte2
Base Address+3 Byte3

Intel processors (those used in PC's) use "Little Endian" byte order.
"Big Endian" means that the high-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the low-order byte at the highest address. The same 4 byte integer would be stored as:

Base Address+0 Byte3
Base Address+1 Byte2
Base Address+2 Byte1
Base Address+3 Byte0

Motorola processors (those used in Mac's) use "Big Endian" byte order.

Thank you so much.

Thanks dude!!

Thanks dude :)

Krunal was rite about the processors architecture but explanation for Little and Big Endian architecture got reversed.

Here a Proper and Correct Explanation.

Consider the storage of the value ABCD
Here,

A-MSB(Most Significant Byte).
B
C
D-LSB(Least Significant Byte).

In Little Endian Architecture, LSB is at the lowest address of the memory location. Suppose memory location starts with 0
D->0
C->1
B->2
A->3
Intel Processors(CPUs) are Little Endian.

In Big Endian Architecture, MSB is at the lowest address of the memory location. As shown below.
A->0
B->1
C->2
D->3
While Motorola 680x0 CPUs are big-endian

For more details and confirmation visit : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Big-endian

@Kavita

Thanks for proper information. Super!

Good thread guys,
thanks to every one and india bix.

Thank you so much Krunal.

Thank you Krunal and Kavitha.

I had a doubt if I had to store 01020304 in little endian, according to ur discription it is 04030201 but why it could not be 40302010 ?