Subject: Which-endian identification?

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 12:20:33 +0000

At 22:41 21/01/99 -0800, Mohsen BANAN wrote:

[...]
>It is about a fundamental architectural design
>decision.  Based on what we have learned over
>the past 15 years, the "right" and the
>"wrong" are quite clear now. 
>
>Key architectural attributes for "right" and
>"wrong" are consistency, uniformity, cohesion,
>fitness in bigger pictures, usability,  ...

*If* there is a definitive right or wrong here (which I doubt), there are
arguments either way.  You make one based in part on consistency with
numeric formats.

If my (admittedly poor) knowledge of history of science is correct, use of
positional number systems was first widely adopted by Arabic speaking
societies where the normal written script goes right-to-left.  But (even
when using their own digits) Arabic nations write the most significant
digit at the left (i.e. "last") -- this is something that has often puzzled
me, but I think you have helped me to see that in developing a positional
number system from scratch, it was maybe more natural to write the *least*
significant digit first.  We in the West adopted the arabic numbering
structure without fundamental change, and have grown used to most
significant digit first;  I suspect that's a matter of learning, not
fundamentals.

One technical reason that I believe favours least-significant-first is
abbreviation:  people like to truncate things.  I speculate that what is
required is that the most *relevant* information comes first, so that less
relevant details can be dropped off the "end".  Here, "relevant" is not
(necessarily) the same as "significant":  by "relevant" I mean the
information that is most likely to distinguish one datum from another.
Maybe this is why Japanese use a different postal addressing order to most
Westerners, because of what their culture deems most relevant?

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])