What is byte order?
There are different ways how to map a multi-byte primitive to memory, disk or network. The most usual mappings (out of all [possible] permutations [e.g. totally 24 with 32-bit/4-byte integers]) are little endian byte order (encoding in ascending significance, least-significant byte is encoded first: 0 1 2 3) and big endian byte order (encoding in descending significance, most-significant byte is encoded first: 3 2 1 0). Note that most of the other permutations are not seen at all; however one-bytes ‘groups’ can be handled differently from two-bytes groups, etc. (1 0 3 2 and 2 3 0 1 in the 32bit case, sometimes called ‘mixed endian’), this is however rarely seen. Some CPUs (e.g. MIPS) can serve different endianesses (to enable compatibility to different operating systems), however usually set only at boot time.
