[fpc-pascal] Re: Endian issues when porting FPC programs from x86 to other platforms

[Jonas Maebe]

On 02 Nov 2010, at 12:41, Bo Berglund wrote:

> The end to me is the last (the right-most) byte. And that is the LSB.
> So the end is LSB, the little part...

"Little endian" means "the little end comes first" (with "the little end" referring to the least significant byte). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Etymology for the origins of the term.

> And what happens when the memory itself holds 32 bits (or more) in
> each address? Then everything is stuffed into the same single address
> and the above example will fail...

Endianess is defined in terms of byte-addressable memory. Software running on such an architecture would have to emulate the behaviour of a little or big endian byte-addressable architecture when exchanging data with the outside world.


Jonas