Question

Am I right in thinking that endianess is only relevant when we’re talking about how to store a value and not relevant when copying memory?

For example

if I have a value 0xf2fe0000 and store it on a little endian system – the bytes get stored in the order 00, 00, fe and f2. But on a big endian system the bytes get stored f2, fe, 00 and 00.

Now – if I simply want to copy these 4 bytes to another 4 bytes (on the same system), on a little endian system am I going to end up with another 4 bytes containing 00, 00, fe and f2 in that order?

Or does endianness have an effect when copying these bytes in memory?

Answer 1

memcpy doesn’t know what it is copying. If it has to copy 43 61 74 00, it doesn’t know whether it is copying 0x00746143 or 0x43617400 or a float or "Cat"