大端还是小端

Big endian machine: It thinks the first byte it reads is the biggest.
Little endian machine: It thinks the first byte it reads is the littlest.

举个例子，从内存地址0x0000开始有以下数据
 0x0000     0x12
 0x0001     0x34
 0x0002     0xab
 0x0003     0xcd
如果我们去读取一个地址为0x0000的四个字节变量，若字节序为big-endian，则读出
结果为0x1234abcd；若字节序位little-endian，则读出结果为0xcdab3412.
如果我们将0x1234abcd写入到以0x0000开始的内存中，则结果为
                big-endian     little-endian
0x0000     0x12              0xcd
0x0001     0x23              0xab
0x0002     0xab              0x34
0x0003     0xcd              0x12
x86系列CPU都是little-endian的字节序. 

1 #include<stdio.h>

      2

      3 int main()

      4 {

      5         int x=1;

      6         /*the first method */

      7         if(*(char *) &x==1)

      8                 printf("little/n");

      9         else

     10                 printf("big/n");

     11         /*the second method*/

     12         x = (char)x;

     13         if(x == 1)

     14                 printf("little/n");

     15         else

     16                 printf("big/n");

     17

     18         /*the third method*/

     19         union

{

     21                 int i;

     22                 char c[sizeof(int)];

     23         }y;

     24         y.i =1;

     25         if(y.c[0] == 1)

     26                 printf("little/n");

     27         else

     28                 printf("big/n");

     29

     30 }