Subject: Re: Inquiring minds want to know.
To: None <port-alpha@netbsd.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: port-alpha
Date: 05/17/2003 16:10:09
> The Internet is explicitly big-endian.

Well, "the Internet" per se does not really have endianness.  Many
protocols specify big-endian, and there is a standard - whether de-jure
or merely de-facto I don't know - that prefers big-endian for
multi-byte quantities as binary on the wire.  But not all protocols
actually follow this; I forget which one it was, but I relatively
recently dealt with one which specified little-endian - and then
there's X, which runs little-endian or big-endian as specified by the
client in the connection setup data.

But this does bring up a point I omitted.  I described big-endian and
little-endian as they apply to data in memory.  The terms are also used
for multi-octet quantities serialized into an octet stream in network
protocols, with relatively obvious analogies: "lower-addressed" mapping
to "earlier in the octet stream"....

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