Arithmetic operations in assembly language: Educators' perspective on endianness learning using 8-bit microcontrollers

Endianness concept is of great value for engineers who are employing microcontrollers in their applications. This paper presents a perspective on endianness learning using 8-bit microcontroller units (MCUs). The authors propose a practicable approach on assembly language arithmetic techniques, addressed to aid students in exploring big and little-endian ordering for handling memory storage. The proposed approach associates the study of endianness representation with a regular challenge in 8-bit microcontroller education, that is, the assembly-level arithmetic techniques for numbers extending one-byte range. The educational objective intended to be reached in this communication is to provide to the students a better understanding of the processor's workings at the machine level, and help them in exploiting byte ordering towards to an optimum performance of a low-level system implementation.