Byte order (retitled)

[Griff Smith]

> >>I think the Arabs knew what they were doing; they set the
> >>notation so that the natural computational order followed the
> >>conventional lexical order.  The European merchants missed the point
> >>and copied the notation verbatum instead of compensating for the
> >>opposite lexical convention.
> 
> We have right now A. D. MCMLIIIVI.  Somehow Romans scanned numbers also
> in a "wrong" order. :-)  At least if you are writing from left-to-right.
> 
> Michal Jaegermann
> Myrias Research Corporation
> Edmonton, Alberta
> ...ihnp4!alberta!myrias!mj

Try doing arithmetic with roman numerals!  My impression is that the
Arabic notation was adopted (with much discussion about its sanity,
morality, etc) after merchants conceded that Roman numerals were too
clumsy for business computations.  Considering how the Romans blew the
notation, I wouldn't give them much credit for picking the right digit
order.  Given the entrenched big-endian order in most of the spoken
languages, the merchants may have hesitated to adjust the notation for
fear that it would be hard to speak the numbers (though German numbers
up to 100 are little-endian!).  More likely, they just adopted the
notation verbatum without thinking much about it.
-- 

Griff Smith	AT&T (Bell Laboratories), Murray Hill
Phone:		(201) 582-7736
Internet:	ggs at ulysses.uucp
UUCP:		ulysses!ggs  ( {allegra|ihnp4}!ulysses!ggs )