[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
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