RE: Digression: little/big endian numbers LTR/RTL

You can tell for phone numbers and P.O. Boxes; that's why I chose that example.
 
Best,
 
--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com> > > Hope this does not confuse the issue; I never even realized that> > classical Arabic numbers such as the telephone number could be written> > RTL as Naajib says they are, because I learned in Arabic to write my> > numbers LTR (what little Arabic I learned).> > Unfortunately you cannot tell by looking at a digit sequence like "12345"> whether 1 was written first and then LTR, or 5 was written first and> then RTL. There is no particular advantage to one approach over the> other, and if your language reads "12345" as "five and forty and three> hundred and two-and-ten thousand" and you normally write RTL anyway,> then writing 5 first seems quite sensible.> > Doubly unfortunately, what makes no difference on the page makes a> fundamental difference in the computer. Right now, Unicode always> places the most-significant digit first in a text stream (the 1 in the> example above); if it has to handle Classical Arabic (or Elvish) numbers,> that won't work so well. (Elvish numbers are written LTR with the least> significant digit first, as 54321.)> > -- > John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org> Please leave your values Check your assumptions. In fact,> at the front desk. check your assumptions at the door.> --sign in Paris hotel --Cordelia Vorkosigan