You’re mixing up big-endian and little-endian. Big-endian is the notation used in English: twelve is 12 in big-endian and 21 in little-endian. But yes, 123.456 in big-endian would be 654.321 and with a decimal point, you couldn’t parse little-endian numbers in the way described by lsusr.
I thought the whole idea with the naming was that the convention whereby “twelve is written 12” the symbol at the end “2″ is the one symbolising the littlest bit, so I thought it was called “little endian” for that reason.
I now I have a lot of questions about how the names were chosen (to wikipedia!). It seems really backwards.
I had the same confusion when I first heard those names. It’s called little-endian because “you start with the little end”, and the term comes from an analogy to Gulliver
You’re mixing up big-endian and little-endian. Big-endian is the notation used in English: twelve is 12 in big-endian and 21 in little-endian. But yes, 123.456 in big-endian would be 654.321 and with a decimal point, you couldn’t parse little-endian numbers in the way described by lsusr.
You are right.
I thought the whole idea with the naming was that the convention whereby “twelve is written 12” the symbol at the end “2″ is the one symbolising the littlest bit, so I thought it was called “little endian” for that reason.
I now I have a lot of questions about how the names were chosen (to wikipedia!). It seems really backwards.
I had the same confusion when I first heard those names. It’s called little-endian because “you start with the little end”, and the term comes from an analogy to Gulliver