[OT]Big endian eggs

Jack Johnson fragment at nas.com
Fri Aug 22 22:26:21 UTC 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? ;-)

Strangely enough, part of that is in Cohen's paper.  Not all languages 
use big-endian numbers (his example is Hebrew, which is little-endian).

Ian Piumarta wrote:

> 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).

Orientation is really arbitrary.  The big thing is to consider when 
wondering if you're big-endian or little-endian is do you say/think 
"ninety-nine" or "neun und neunzig"?

I suppose one could argue that it makes sense to write numbers 
big-endian if you're using a zero placeholder, especially if you're 
using words instead of numbers, but even that's just convention.

It might be fun to sit down with some texts on preliterate math (or, 
maybe some really young kids) and see how much of it is rooted in 
language and how much of it is rooted in nature.

-Jack



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