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big-endian
[Article still incomplete]
Qualifies a computer architecture in which, the most significant byte of a multiple-byte numerical value is stored first. It contrasts with see little endian architectures. Big-endian architectures include notably the Motorola microprocessor families and most of the RISC architectures. The distinction between big and little-endian has taken all its importance with the avent of Unicode. Indeed using UCS-2 or UTF-16 encoding scheme character could become corrupted. Using the BOM character at the begining of a Unicode stream helps tackle this issue. On big-endian architecture the BOM reads FEFF and on little endian architecture the BOM reads FFFE. |
Article submitted by: Thierry Sourbier
Last modified: 2009-10-20
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