Abstract
Big-endian
- We locate the most significant byte of the 32-bit integer at the byte with the lowest address in the memory (This is how we usually write numbers, from left to right)
- Dominant ordering in networking protocols due influence of the Internet Protocol (IP) Suite
Small-endian
- We locate the least significant byte of the data at the byte with the lowest address
- Dominant ordering in processor architecture, because it offers certain advantages in terms of memory access (we can confidently say that the first 2 bytes are 0-31bits)