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Comment by hibbelig | Hacker News Reader

That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy.

Starting with the most general and ending with the most specific is a logical order. Doing it the other way round is also logical. But starting with the middle makes no sense.

It doesn’t seem unusual to you because you use it often.

That said I’m German and I realize that German postal addresses are crazy for the same reason. I wish we‘d adopt the Chinese format: country first then province (state), then County then town then neighborhood then street and house.

German addresses are middle endian: street then house number then zip code then city then country. The right order seems to be: city, zip, street, house number. Most general to most specific.

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What's so crazy about the German notation? Seems to make perfect sense, as it goes line-by-line from the smallest to the largest sorting unit:

1. Exact street location (street + house)

2. District (postal code)

3. City

4. Country

Also I prefer this order over the Chinese, because I assume most people handling mail will need to smallest details and it would just be very annoying if local mailmen had to skip over country and city names every time before reaching the bit they actually need.

I think he meant, that the street name is before the house number

You listed two details on one line to make the German notation seem non-crazy.

A more "logical" notation, as per the gp's comment would start:

1. Exact street location (house + street)

In Poland We do it exactly as you said:

Street_name street_number/house_number

Postal_code, City, Country

The typical English-influenced way to do it starts with the number,the most specific thing.

  10 Downing Street
  London
  SW1A 2AA

(The postcode is least-specific first: SW is South West London, 1 is the district nearest Central London, and the 2 would usually be a few streets and the AA 5-10 houses, but this is a unique code for an address that gets a lot of post.)

Funnily enough, with the addition of the newest element to that format — the postcode — to the end, this format also becomes less "logical", postcode being very specific.

Of course that's arguable, as postcode shouldn't really be considered a component of-, rather an alternative to- other sections of the address.

A postcode (or local equivalent) isn't necessarily particularly specific. For example, here in Austria the equivalent of a postcode might cover a whole city district.

Yes, similar to the US. But British post codes (or at least the ones I’ve seen in London) are in fact very specific.

Indeed, a single postcode in the UK will contain (on average) about 20 addresses and (usually) only refer to a single street.

ZIP+4 in the US is quite specific, though. E.g., my ZIP code is probably > 50k people but the ZIP+4 is just my apartment building.

The house number is smaller than the street, but the street comes first. If we put the house number first, then we'd get a logical order.

You're thinking of street and house number as two things. Germans don't. Or at least I don't. Your approach makes as much sense as picking movie titles with numbers at the end apart into two things.

Street and house number are certainly two different things. It's more like series of movies (Die Hard 1, Die Hard 2, etc. are different movies but part of the same series. In the same way, a street could be seen as a series of houses or addresses. So the smallest unit is the house, then the street.

Yes, it's like a movie series. It's Die Hard 2. That's one name, not two, "2" and "Die Hard", but one: "Die Hard 2".

I didn't say it was two names, I said there are two different movies within the Die Hard series. Just like two different houses on the same street.

Yes, but each movie is a single entity and the number is part of that entity. Just like with "street+house number". It's one entity, not two.

You are missing the name of the house resident as the first line. Once I had my mail returned to the sender because my parents-in-law did not put our name on the envelope.

For something like addresses, usage pattern is going to matter... if most mail is sent within the city, then putting street first makes sense, because the city is almost always the same; it shouldn't take up valuable real estate at the front of the address.

The broadest unit that is likely to change going first makes sense.

> That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy.

The english language—and every other real-world spoken language—is full of rules and exceptions that make absolutely zero logical sense. How far down this road do you want to go?

As long as we speak in a specific order, I don't think it's crazy at all to write in that same order. After all, normal written sentences follow the spoken order of words, too.

Hungarian addresses are (or were) worse. According to http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/, it's:

1. name of recipient, 2. town name, 3. street address or post box number, 4. four digit postal code.

(I have a vague memory of seeing that sort of order in German, too, in a historical context, but perhaps it was from Austria-Hungary.)

Or from botton to top: country, city, zip, housenumber, street, name.

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