Big-endian vs little-endian

Big-endian vs little-endian is another compatibility issue with various processor architectures. The issue stems from the byte ordering of multibyte constants. The x86 architecture is little-endian. For example, the hexadecimal number 0x12345678 is stored in memory as:

address contents
      0 0x78
      1 0x56
      2 0x34
      3 0x12

A big-endian processor would store the data in the following order:

address contents
      0 0x12
      1 0x34
      2 0x56
      3 0x78

This issue is worrisome on a number of fronts:

The first and second points are closely related.