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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

We (the West) were screwed over by those who brought Arabic numbers into Europe ... They should have reversed their order as they did it ... It makes addition and subtraction easier if you work them right to left as in the original Arabic

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How? Isn't that essentially adding and subtracting from the most significant to least significant? Could you demonstrate why it's simpler with an example? 1532 - 879 will be adequate.

Not OP, but I guess it's easier because you work from left to right. At least, I find subtraction/addition easier to do from least to most significant digit, since the results of the less significant digits affect the more significant digits, but not the other way around.

EDIT: To be clear, going from left to right is not inherently 'easier' but it would be more consistent with our direction of writing.

Isn't that what we actually do, though? Everyone is taught to subtract or add least to most. Why would we want to flip anything.

Because then 'least' is on the left, and you work from left to right, in the same way that you read from left to right.

Ah I see. Thought there was more to it consider the "screwed over". Bit dramatic, I thinnk, that fellow.

Yes but it's cause all sorts of angst in the computer architecture world - "little endian" architectures are "pure" in the sense that arabic is with it's embedded numbers, while big-endian systems are this weird mixed artifact of our language with text bytes going from lower to higher addresses and integers going the other way.

Over time we all realised that big-endian systems (IBM, 68k, etc, and our native western languages) were a hack and we've moved to little endian systems (intel, arm, DEC, ...) as sane

Nothing better than a bit of internet drama :)

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