A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads “Happy 17th Birthday”

  • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    I’m not seeing any trailing zeros if that is in little endian, you start little end first and it isn’t limited to a silly 8-bits, it can be used to represent numbers far larger than 255 if continued (though then it wouldn’t be representative of a byte and half the joke would be lost).

    • MaggiWuerze@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      If you read from the right (as is implied by calling the result 17), there are 3 trailing zeroes:

      These would usually be omitted when writing like this. The fact they are not makes this 136

      • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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        1 day ago

        I think you missed the point, that I was making, albeit poorly (little endian still requires leading zeros when not transmitting in a byte format, otherwise you don’t know if the first on signal is for 1, 256, 1024, etc.) it’s all good though

        • MaggiWuerze@feddit.org
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          22 hours ago

          How would 3 leading zeros in a byte help coming to the conclusion that this is supposed to be 17?

          I’m generally curious, sice theoretical informatics is already a good few years behind me :D

          • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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            21 hours ago

            In a normal byte format it wouldn’t help, the byte standard breaks off bits into 8 bit chunks and calls them bytes (I’m not trying to explain basics, just putting it there for background), little-endian excels at using the least number of bits to express larger numbers in a stream. If you wanted to send any number from 0-255 you only need 1 byte, for 256-512 you need two bytes (or 16 bits), in little-endian it can be represented in just 9 bits, or up to 1024 in 10 bits, etc.

            Doesn’t matter for much to many people, but when the number gets big enough you can save a lot of bandwidth.