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.