Endianness — why do chars put in an Int16 print backwards?

Question

The following C code, compiled and run in XCode:

UInt16 chars = \'ab\';
printf(\"\\nchars: %2.2s\", (char*)&chars);

prints \'ba\', rather t

Answer 1

It depends on the system you're compiling/running your program on.

Obviously on your system, the short value is stored in memory as 0x6261 (ba): the little endian way.

When you ask to decode a string, printf will read byte by byte the value you have stored in memory, which actually is 'b', then 'a'. Thus your result.