> How are Arabic numbers written in a paragraph of Arabic ... text?  =I believe 
> they are little endian (right to left) so that, 
as viewed by a westerner, they appear big endian, 
just the same as we are accustomed to seeing them.  

Of course, some of the numerals are quite different 
(the number 5 comes to mind) but, in general, 
with a little imagination, it's easily decypherable.  
===  > Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:33:10 -0500
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Is there a correspondence between 64-bit IBM mainframes and 
> PoOps editions levels?
> To: [email protected]
> 
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2012 14:25:11 +0000, Bill Fairchild wrote:
> >
> >It could be a lot worse.  Hardware engineers number the bits in a byte in 
> >the opposite manner that we software techies do; i.e., bit 0 (hardware) = 
> >bit 7 (software), etc.  I think hardware people must consider bit 0, the 
> >rightmost bit in their world view, to represent two to the zero-th power, so 
> >I understand why they number the bits from right to left.  There are also 
> >many languages that are written, and thus must be read, from right to left, 
> >and some languages anciently were even written both ways on the same stone 
> >document using the boustrophedon method described once by John Gilmore.
> > 
> "Left" and "right" may be not very meaningful here.  A colleague once
> asked me,
> 
>     "Does this computer store bits left-to-right or right-to-left?"
> 
>     "Point of view.  If I look at the indicator lights on the front panel,
>     it appears to be left-to-right;  if I walk around and open the back
>     panel, it appears right-to-left.  If I stand it on its side as a tower..."
> 
>     "You know what I mean!"
> 
> Actually, I didn't.  Does he mean how they appear in the engineering
> drawings?  How they're conventionally numbered?  Other?
> 
> I once looked at a VAX (little-endian) dump.  The ASCII and hex
> appeared side-by-side, in opposite reading directions.
> 
> How are Arabic numbers written in a paragraph of Arabic (or Hebrew)
> text?  (This may depend on behavior of specific word processors.)
> 
> -- gil
                                          
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