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A comment on Byte Ordering: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980). Parent comment

Re:Byte Ordering: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980) by wakawaka28 on Monday September 16, 2024 @09:45AM (#41556017)
Do you have any evidence that, say, "three million, one hundred twenty-five thousand, two hundred sixty-nine" would have ever been spoken starting with "nine" and ending with "three million"? I guess that wouldn't be the dumbest thing humans have ever done, but it sure sounds impractical.
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Re:Byte Ordering: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980) by kstenerud on Monday September 16, 2024 @10:05AM (#41556203)
The "dumbness" depends entirely on what you're used to. There's no actual need to lead off with the most significant digit other than convention.

"three million, one hundred twenty-five thousand, two hundred sixty-nine"

"nine, sixty, two hundred, thousands five, twenty, one hundred, millions three"

It could work either way.

And in fact, in the early days of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system's penetration into Europe, they actually DID lead off with the least significant digit (although numbers larger than thousands were rarely used, and the archaic wordings have only survived in the ones and tens digits - if at all for a particular language).

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Re:Byte Ordering: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980) by wakawaka28 on Monday September 16, 2024 @07:13PM (#41562186)
>It could work either way.

Yes but one of those ways does not support abbreviation or interruption, or fractions. If you see a 9 digit number for example, you might want to just round off to one or two significant digits while reading it. Having the smallest components first presents obstacles to speech in much the same way Roman numerals do.

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Re:Byte Ordering: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980) by kstenerud on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @01:26AM (#41564427)
That's also convention talking. Looking at the number 443937215, it's trivial to identify the first two or the last two digits. And for counting digits to get an idea of the magnitude, we use separators like so: 443,937,215 (or 443.937.215 depending on what country you're in).

The only difference is whether you estimate this number as "about four hundred and forty million" or "about ten and five hundred million"

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Re:Byte Ordering: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980) by wakawaka28 on Wednesday September 18, 2024 @12:50AM (#41575911)
It's not just the convention talking. People chose the convention over time to be the most convenient overall. But whatever, I don't care enough to keep arguing. Look at my other comments in this thread for more explanation if you want.
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