Editing Endianness (section)

=== Byte addressing ===
{{See also|Byte addressing}}

When memory bytes are printed sequentially from left to right (e.g. in a [[hex dump]]), little-endian representation of integers has the significance increasing from right to left. In other words, it appears backwards when visualized, which can be counter-intuitive.

This behavior arises, for example, in [[FourCC]] or similar techniques that involve packing characters into an integer, so that it becomes a sequence of specific characters in memory. For example, take the string "JOHN", stored in hexadecimal [[ASCII]]. On big-endian machines, the value appears left-to-right, coinciding with the correct string order for reading the result ("J O H N"). But on a little-endian machine, one would see "N H O J". Middle-endian machines complicate this even further; for example, on the [[PDP-11]], the 32-bit value is stored as two 16-bit words "JO" "HN" in big-endian, with the characters in the 16-bit words being stored in little-endian, resulting in "O J N H".<ref name=":0" />