Re:The Byte Order Fiasco
by mafuy on Saturday May 08, 2021 @09:30AM
(#27086961)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but were the now common numbers not imported in the same order from Arabic, which writes right to left? So numbers were invented in little endian, and we just forgot to translate their order.
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Good question, I just did a little digging to see if I could find out. It sounds like old Arabic did indeed use little endian in writing and speaking, but modern Arabic does not. However, place values weren’t invented in Arabic, Wikipedia says that occurred in Mesopotamia, which spoke primarily Sumerian and was written in Cuneiform - where the direction was left to right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number#First_use_of_numbers