Lilliput and Files: An Aventure in Endianess Issues
Background
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the main character, Gulliver, arrives in a land of little people (called Lilliput). Here he encounters two warring factions — those that cut eggs from the little end first, and those who cut eggs from the big end first. Thus the Little-Endians and Big-Endians warred over something fairly unimportant.
Similarly, in the land of computing, there are two major factions of how to store datatypes in memory and on disk. They are also called Little-Endian (least significant first) and Big-Endian (most significant first). Please note that there are other factions. In school (and other places) we tend to learn to use binary and hexadecimal notation in Big-Endian format (where the right most digit is the ‘ones’ column).
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Tags: .NET, big endian, code, endian, literary, little endian
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This is all well and good, and I’m sure there were good intentions behind it, but quite frankly, it’s annoying when your app is supposed to come to the foreground and it doesn’t.
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There is this wonderful error that sometimes happens when you’re running your .NET app on machines that are not your development machine:
Quote:
Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.