Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!vuwcomp!dsiramd!marcamd!aucsv!ok
From: ok@aucsv.UUCP (Richard Okeefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Endian wars
Summary: a little history
Message-ID: <186@aucsv.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jan 89 05:00:42 GMT
References: <6133@columbia.edu>
Organization: Computer Science Dept.,University of Auckland,New Zealand
Lines: 15

Before arguing about whether big-endian order or little-endian
order is "more natural" for people, it's enlightening to consider
the historical origin of the way we write numbers.  We write from
left to right, and put the most significant digit on the left.
But we copied that method of writing numbers from >>Arabic<<
mathematics, where the direction of writing was otherwise right
to left.  So in Arabic, you encountered the low digit first in
your normal reading scan.  This had the pleasant psychological
advantage that when you added two numbers, you wrote the answer
down in the order that you always wrote numbers, instead of
starting from the opposite end.  There was one famous mathematician
this century who habitually wrote numbers least-significant-digit-
first, apparently for this reason.

So _both_ conventions are "natural" in human writing systems.