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Title: Little endian values in Block-header Post by: mechanikalk on November 18, 2018, 09:39:56 PM Does anyone have any idea why Satoshi made all values in the block-header stored as little endian in byte code except for the Merkle root? It is a frustrating thing when working with code and I can't figure out why it would have been done this way? Any guesses or thoughts or reasonings for this?
Title: Re: Little endian values in Block-header Post by: theymos on November 18, 2018, 11:11:59 PM The Merkle root is also little-endian...
As to why, it's because the fields are read/written directly between memory and the socket, and that's how the data is ordered in memory. Integers are little-endian in memory because that's how the supported architectures do things. It's a little weird that hashes are stored little-endian, but Satoshi put most hashes in a uint256 type which behaved how you'd expect a 256-bit integer to behave on eg. x86, including little-endianness. |