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The book does say "Both orders are commonly used by modern processor types". I'd say this sentence is quite misleading, since it would lead you to believe two falsehoods:

1. That both byte orders are equally prevalent in the wild, particularly in systems that are expected to run modern C code.

2. That both byte orders are equally likely to be found in "modern" (new or updated) processor design.

It's not entirely incorrect, but a better phrasing could be used to clarify that little-endian is the more modern and common storage order, but you still cannot ignore big-endian.



Don't a bunch of web protocols use big endian?


You can go lower than that, TCP/IP itself is big-endian (see RFC 1700).




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