[Haskell-cafe] Re: Endianess

[Jed Brown]

On Tue 2008-05-13 22:14, Achim Schneider wrote:
> Jed Brown <jed at 59A2.org> wrote:
> 
> > It's not that simple with bits.  They lack consistency just like the
> > usual US date format and the way Germans read numbers.
> > 
> So you claim that you pronounce 14 tenty-four? In German pronunciation
> is completely uniform from 13 to 99.

I would argue that 100n+11 to 100n+19 are special cases in both German and
English, but only 100n+11 to 100n+15 in Spanish.  In any case, the order of the
digits is dependent on where the decimal falls.  If the ordering is pure little
endian (not x86 halfway) or big endian, the bit order is not dependent on the
width of the field.  Converting breaks this nice property.  Convention is to
write numbers in big endian and it would be nice if there were fewer exceptions.
Yet another argument for ISO 8601 dates.  A somewhat dramatic change would be to
put the exponent first in scientific notation.  Alas, this seems unlikely to
happen.

Jed
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