Xref: utzoo comp.arch:8014 comp.misc:4803 comp.lang.misc:2608 comp.protocols.misc:469 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.misc,comp.lang.misc,comp.protocols.misc Subject: Re: "big endian" and "little endian" - first usage for computer Summary: I did mention this exception Keywords: dump little-endian strings Message-ID: <1108@l.cc.purdue.edu> Date: 25 Jan 89 12:24:17 GMT References: <170@microsoft.UUCP> <4008@hubcap.UUCP> <482@babbage.acc.virginia.edu> <250@dsacg2.UUCP> Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department Lines: 41 In article <250@dsacg2.UUCP>, nol2105@dsacg2.UUCP (Robert E. Zabloudil) writes: > In article <1916@ardent.UUCP>, mac@mrk.ardent.com (Michael McNamara) writes: > > In article <1102@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes: > > |There does not seem to be any support from "natural" languages for the > > |little-endian approach. > > Four and twenty black birds, baked in a pie.... > > In German: 24 == vierundzwnzig > In Dutch it's expressed similarly > > Also compare English thirteen, fourteen, ... nineteen. If you read my posting, I did state that there was reversal of the units and tens digits in many languages. This occurs regular in the Germanic languages, as many have posted. In Spanish, it only occurs from 11-15, and in French, from 11-16. A correction to my statement about Hebrew; it also applies there to hundreds, but either order can occur, and in fact both orders occur in the same passage. However, my statement still holds. To give a counterexample, it would be necessary to come up with examples where such numbers as 46,378 have the 378 before the 46,000. I know of no such examples. The clear resolution of this problem occurs in these cases of multi-"byte" expressions. The early symbolic representation of numbers by alphabetic characters or other symbols is, in every case to my knowledge, in the same order as the written letters. Even the Roman numerals do this, in that if a less significant symbol appears before a more significant one, it is treated anomalously. But the Roman numerals were not used for calculating. The early numerical representations used letters, but because of no 0 symbol, different letters were used in different places, or other devices were used. I know of no ancient little-endian devices. In Hebrew, 378 would always be 300 first, then 70, then 8, in the right-to-left direction of the writing, even though both word orders occur, and the other order would be unambiguous. The apparent little-endianness of Arabic is due to the direct importation of the left-to-right symbolic numerical writing from India. -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)