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by CydeWeys 1869 days ago
I'm curious how you're defining "natural", and if you think ISO-8601 is the reverse of "natural" too.

All human number systems I've ever seen write numbers out as big Endian (yes, even Roman numerals), so I'm really struggling to see how that wouldn't be considered natural.
2 comments
bombcar 1868 days ago
Counting out change is little endian - usually you start cents then dollars.

I wonder if we went big endian “by mistake” with Arabic numerals given that Arabic is written right to left.

Some ancient texts have “four and twenty” which is little endian.

We also add commas to large numbers to help with a human processing problem - you have to get to the end of the number to know what the first digit represents and then count backwards (groups of three help).

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ByteJockey 1869 days ago
It seems like it would be a more natural for representing the number when communicating with a human.

But that's not what we're doing here, so it's not entirely relevant.

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