Editing Endianness (section)

=== Floating point ===

Although many processors use little-endian storage for all types of data (integer, floating point), there are a number of hardware architectures where [[floating-point]] numbers are represented in big-endian form while integers are represented in little-endian form.<ref>{{citation |title=Floating-Point Formats |author-first=John J. G. |author-last=Savard |date=2018 |orig-year=2005 |work=quadibloc |url=http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cp0201.htm |access-date=2018-07-16 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180703001709/http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cp0201.htm |archive-date=2018-07-03}}</ref> There are [[ARM architecture|ARM]] processors that have mixed-endian floating-point representation for double-precision numbers: each of the two 32-bit words is stored as little-endian, but the most significant word is stored first. [[VAX]] floating point stores little-endian 16-bit words in big-endian order. Because there have been many floating-point formats with no network standard representation for them, the [[External Data Representation|XDR]] standard uses big-endian IEEE 754 as its representation. It may therefore appear strange that the widespread [[IEEE 754]] floating-point standard does not specify endianness.<ref>{{cite web |title = pack – convert a list into a binary representation |url = http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc/pack.html |access-date = 2009-02-04 |archive-date = 2009-02-18 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20090218010333/http://perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc/pack.html |url-status = live }}</ref> Theoretically, this means that even standard IEEE floating-point data written by one machine might not be readable by another. However, on modern standard computers (i.e., implementing IEEE 754), one may safely assume that the endianness is the same for floating-point numbers as for integers, making the conversion straightforward regardless of data type. Small [[embedded system]]s using special floating-point formats may be another matter, however.