> On Feb 1, 2021, at 2:13 PM, David Bridgham via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> ...
> Sure, one can get into the story that our numbers come from Arabic and
> Arabic is written right-to-left so in fact they were originally
> little-endian and just didn't get flipped around when incorporated into
> left-to-right languages but that's all lost in the past. Today, we
> write numbers, in English, big-endian so it's no surprise at all that
> some computers followed that common practice.
In Hebrew at least, numbers are written left to right. Also, as I understand
it, in Arabic our numbers are called "Indian numbers" in recognition of the
fact that they originated in India. They came to Europe via Arabia, but that's
not their point of origin apparently.
paul
