How does a little endian do a decimal point? Do they put the fractional part of the number at the beginning (before the decimal) and the integer part afterwards? Eg. 123.456 becomes 654.321? So just like all integers in big-endian notation can be imaged to have a trailing ”.0″ they can all be imagined to have a leading “0.” in little-endian?
The way we do it currently has the nice feature that the powers of 10 keep going in the same direction (smaller) through a decimal point. To maintain this feature a little-endian requires that everything before the decimal point is the sub-integer component. Which has the feature lsusr doesn’t like that if we are reading character by character the decimal forces us to re-interpret all previous characters.
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
Ordinary numerals in English are already big-endian: that is, the digits with largest (“big”) positional value are first in reading order. The term (with this meaning) is most commonly applied to computer representation of numbers, having been borrowed from the book Gulliver’s Travels in which part of the setting involves bitter societal conflict about which end of an egg one should break in order to start eating it.
How does a little endian do a decimal point? Do they put the fractional part of the number at the beginning (before the decimal) and the integer part afterwards? Eg. 123.456 becomes 654.321? So just like all integers in big-endian notation can be imaged to have a trailing ”.0″ they can all be imagined to have a leading “0.” in little-endian?
The way we do it currently has the nice feature that the powers of 10 keep going in the same direction (smaller) through a decimal point. To maintain this feature a little-endian requires that everything before the decimal point is the sub-integer component. Which has the feature lsusr doesn’t like that if we are reading character by character the decimal forces us to re-interpret all previous characters.
[Edited to get the endians the right way around]
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
Ordinary numerals in English are already big-endian: that is, the digits with largest (“big”) positional value are first in reading order. The term (with this meaning) is most commonly applied to computer representation of numbers, having been borrowed from the book Gulliver’s Travels in which part of the setting involves bitter societal conflict about which end of an egg one should break in order to start eating it.