From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Mon May 18 2009 - 21:33:28 CDT
Raymond Mercier wrote:
> Petr Tomasek writes
>> Because arabic numerals ARE written left-to-right. (Historically this is
>> probably due to the fact, that in arabic the the numbers were read
>> starting from the least significant digit, e.g. "three and twenty and
>> hundert"
>> for 123...)
>
> I rather think that this LtoR order is owed simply to the Indian
> origin of this notation.
You're sort of asking for trouble if you try to think of numbers as
"right to left" or "left to right" originally. As Petr points out, it
depends which end you consider to be the front. Western typography is
pleased to consider the most significant digit to be the first digit,
and thus we consider numbers to be written left to right. This happens
to be the same direction that Arabic writing uses (most significant
digit on the left); whether or not it is the "first" digit is another
matter, and one that doesn't make that much difference. For better or
worse, the convention is numbers in Arabic text are also considered to
be most-significant-digit-first, and thus are stored in the reverse of
their presentation order. That's the convention, it's what's been used
for a while, we deal with it.
~mark
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