[SpamCop-List] Re: spam is NOT 10 days old to me - got it this a.m.

[Frank Ellermann]

Mike Easter wrote:

> German puts the digits before the tens in the names of a lot
> more numbers than just those teens, like vier und zwanzig

Yes, from 13 to 99, strange, but not worse than the French 80.

> '/designed/ for right to left?'

If you read decimal numbers from right to left you immediately
know that the first digit is 0..9, the second adds 10..90, etc.

If you read it left to right you need an "algorithm" to decode
it, the first digit is the most significant.  You'll only know
"how" significant it is until you've reached the last digit.

Not the same situation as for the "endinanness" of numbers in
computers, because there you normally work with fixed lengths
like say 64 bits (16 hex. digits).

 [in your other article]
> http://www.i18nguy.com/MiddleEastUI.html

Yes, their written numbers look precisely like our numbers.
But their general direction is right to left, so what's "big
endian" for us is "little endian" for them:

| Although text is written from right-to-left, numbers are
| generally written the same way as with left-to-right
| languages. That is, numbers are written with the most
| significant digit positioned left-most.
[...]
| Although Arabic text is written right-to-left, numbers are
| written the same way as in left-to-right languages, with the
| most significant digit on the left. So the number 123 (one
| hundred and twenty three) is written ١٢٣
| ("123", not "321").

I _think_ that's just expressed awkwardly, and they write:

  tfel <- ot <- thgir <- 1 <- 2 <- 3 <- tfel <- ot <- thgir

So the result is how we know it for the number, but the first
written digit is 3, then 2, then 1, right to left.  Maybe I'm
wrong, convince me... ;-)  We could also ask Tex, he's one of
the Unicode / I18N / language / script experts.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals

Yeah, they didn't invent it:

| The numeral system came to be known to both the Persian
| mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, whose book On the Calculation
| with Hindu Numerals written about 825, and the Arab
| mathematician Al-Kindi, who wrote four
[...]

I didn't know that the word "Algebra" is derived from the
title of this book written by Al-Khwarizmi, but I knew that
the word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm is derived
from his name (Al-Khwarizmi).

After some digging I found "all lndic scripts run left to
right".  OTOH I also found that the Persian script is based
on Arab, also used for some time in India,

Okay, beats me, no idea what the "original endianness" of the
decimal numbers was.  For Al-Khwarizmi probably right-to-left
little endian.
                          Bye, Frank