@me Do you have a source for the idea that big vs little endian has anything to do with the order of digits in Arabic numbers? I think those are two completely independent concepts.

@me No, you use right justified figures when performing sums so that digits with the same order of magnitude are aligned vertically. Trying to do addition on left justified numbers would be madness! I’m old enough that when I was a kid all sums were done manually, without a calculator. Maybe future generations will forget the reason for this.

@me Some CPU designers felt that low order bits should be stored in lower addresses. On 8 bit machines, bits 0-7 would be stored in byte 0, bits 8-15 in byte 1, etc. This was more convenient for calculations and slightly reduced the number of transistors, but backwards for humans reading numbers in a memory dump. It also meant that the low order bits of 8, 16 and 32 bit values would always be stored in the low byte. Some software would take advantage of this, for example writing an 8 bit value then later reading it as a 16 bit value (of course causing endian problems if the code was ever switched to a big endian processor). Other CPU designers wanted memory dumps in “human” order (big endian) even at the cost of some extra transistors. None of this had anything to do with Arabic numbers or left vs. right writing systems.

@me That’s really interesting, thanks for the link. But I think that makes me convinced even more strongly that big/little endian issues have nothing to do with Arabic, but rather is an entirely new concept from the 1960’s/70’s.