A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads “Happy 17th Birthday”
A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads “Happy 17th Birthday”
Little-endian for the win!
I was just thinking about what you’d see from the other side of the table.
Even in little endian you don’t have trailing zeroes
I’m not seeing any trailing zeros if that is in little endian, you start little end first and it isn’t limited to a silly 8-bits, it can be used to represent numbers far larger than 255 if continued (though then it wouldn’t be representative of a byte and half the joke would be lost).
If you read from the right (as is implied by calling the result 17), there are 3 trailing zeroes:
These would usually be omitted when writing like this. The fact they are not makes this 136
I think you missed the point, that I was making, albeit poorly (little endian still requires leading zeros when not transmitting in a byte format, otherwise you don’t know if the first on signal is for 1, 256, 1024, etc.) it’s all good though
How would 3 leading zeros in a byte help coming to the conclusion that this is supposed to be 17?
I’m generally curious, sice theoretical informatics is already a good few years behind me :D
In a normal byte format it wouldn’t help, the byte standard breaks off bits into 8 bit chunks and calls them bytes (I’m not trying to explain basics, just putting it there for background), little-endian excels at using the least number of bits to express larger numbers in a stream. If you wanted to send any number from 0-255 you only need 1 byte, for 256-512 you need two bytes (or 16 bits), in little-endian it can be represented in just 9 bits, or up to 1024 in 10 bits, etc.
Doesn’t matter for much to many people, but when the number gets big enough you can save a lot of bandwidth.
Yeah, that digs up some long lost memories :D
Thanks