When Endianness Matters

Endianness is relevant only for multi-byte data types:

• Integers (when size > 8 bits)
• Floats (which are always multi-byte)
• UTF-16 and UTF-32 (multi-byte character encodings)

It does not matter for:

• Single-byte integers
• UTF-8 (which is byte-oriented)
• Plain binaries (which are just sequences of bytes)

Floating Point and Endianness

IEEE 754 floating-point numbers are also subject to endianness concerns:

lfe> (set pi 3.14159265359)
3.14159265359

lfe> (binary ((pi float)))
#B(64 9 33 251 84 68 45 24)  ; Big-endian double

lfe> (binary ((pi float little)))
#B(24 45 68 84 251 33 9 64)  ; Little-endian double