6.6.12.1 Endianness

Some of the following procedures take an endianness parameter. The endianness is defined as the order of bytes in multi-byte numbers: numbers encoded in big endian have their most significant bytes written first, whereas numbers encoded in little endian have their least significant bytes first¹⁰.

Little-endian is the native endianness of the IA32 architecture and its derivatives, while big-endian is native to SPARC and PowerPC, among others. The native-endianness procedure returns the native endianness of the machine it runs on.

Scheme Procedure: native-endianness

C Function: scm_native_endianness ()

Return a value denoting the native endianness of the host machine.

Scheme Macro: endianness symbol

Return an object denoting the endianness specified by symbol. If symbol is neither big nor little then an error is raised at expand-time.

C Variable: scm_endianness_big

C Variable: scm_endianness_little

The objects denoting big- and little-endianness, respectively.