Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond

On 08/05/2024 04:11, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 07 May 2024 19:16:40 -0600, John Savard wrote:
 

Character strings are in big-endian order.

 Better thought of as “character strings are stored so ascending addresses
correspond to logical reading order”. Note I didn’t say “display order”,
since that can be quite different.
 

Packed decimal strings should be in the same order as character strings,
so that the relationship between the two is simple and conversion
between the two is quick.

 Now here you are getting into cultural issues, For example, while both
Arabic and Hebrew use decimal numbers, they write the digits in opposite
order.
 

Do you mean that when they write "123" with "1" on the left, they mean the number "three hundred and twenty one" rather than "one hundred and twenty three"?  Or do you mean that where we write the digit "1" first when writing left to right, they write the digit "3" first going right to left?
My understanding was that for both languages, and indeed any other language that uses Arabic numerals, digits are written big-endian read from the left.  Thus "123", with the digit "1" on the left, means the same in Arabic, English, Hebrew, Chinese, or any other language using them.  Anything else would be massively confusing.
Many cultures and languages have additional numeric systems they use as well as the common Arabic numerals.  Some use their own systems as standard, some just for specific purposes (just as English speakers use Roman numerals for some purposes).  And some of these are read right-to-left rather than left-to-right (not necessarily matching the order of their text), others use different symbols for the weighting.
As far as I know, in Hebrew numbers are usually written with Western-style Arabic numerals, in the same order as everywhere else. But they also use a more traditional letter-based system for dates, religious works, and so on.  Those are additive rather than strictly positional (at least up to a limit).
And in written Arabic, Eastern-style Arabic numerals are used, corresponding directly to Western-style Arabic numerals but with somewhat different forms - the order is still most significant digit on the left.
(I have a book on the history of number systems throughout the world, but it is a /long/ time since I read it.)