On Friday, August 22, 2003, at 02:22 PM, 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? ;-)

Well, actually we write them little-endian in a right-to-left script. 
Whoever stole arabic numerals from the arabs apparently didn't bother 
to do the required digit-swapping when using them with the Roman 
alphabet. Perhaps it was because Roman numerals were big-endian.

Colin