[OT]Big endian eggs

Ian Piumarta ian.piumarta at inria.fr
Fri Aug 22 21:30:52 UTC 2003


On Fri, 22 Aug 2003, Andreas Raab wrote:

> And now that we got this let's go back to the roots for real. Why do we
> actually write numbers big-endian? ;-)

What I understand is that it comes from arabic, writing right-to-left.  
If you start with the units and work upwards through tens, hundreds, ...,
writing everything right-to-left, the columns line up properly to do
arithmetic.

When the west discovered the utility of arabic numerals they forgot to
take their left-to-right direction into account (and start with the units
on the left when writing numbers).

Ian



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list