Is your machine little or big endian? Find it out!!

Little endian is a multibyte hardware storage scheme where the most significant byte (the one whose bits contribute a bigger amount to the resulting number) is stored in the lower address. For instance, if an integer is represented with 4 bytes, the number 1 will be represented as:

memory address  0        1        2        3   
Value           00000000 00000000 00000000 00000001

Big endian stores the most significant byte in the highest address. So, again our integer with decimal value 1 will be stored as the following binary number:

memory address  0        1        2        3   
Value           00000001 00000000 00000000 00000000

Do you want to know if your machine stores numbers in Little or Big endian? The following C code will give you the answer:

#include 

int isLittleEndian(){
       // Create an integer with the least significant byte set to 1
       int x = 0x0001;
       //  Get a pointer to the integer, interpret it as a byte, and see
       //  what it contains. So we are giving a look to the contents of the
       //  lowest memory address. If it contain the LSB then it is not 
       //  little endian
       if(*(char*)(&x)==1) return 0;
       else return 1;
}

int main(){
       printf("Is Little Endian: %s",(isLittleEndian())?"True":"False");
       return 0;
}

Again, do not forget that endianness is a characteristic of the hardware.