4 ms·
Urdu uses the original digit writing direction. Numbers are written little-endian in Arabic, and when Latin adopted the Arabic digits the direction of the digit
by lolc 3y ago
Urdu uses the original digit writing direction. Numbers are written little-endian in Arabic, and when Latin adopted the Arabic digits the direction of the digits was kept which made the numbers big-endian in Latin.
The users of Latin scripts are used to big-endian numbers and think this is the natural order. But historically numbers are actually little-endian with the writing direction changed around them in Latin scripts.
Now I want a snippet that flips numbers to little-endian and uses direction markers to show them the "right" way visually. This would only be a little confusing :-)
Update: My LLM got it right on the first try:
function reverseDigitsAndCorrectDirection(inputString) {
const regex = /-?\d+(\.\d+)?/g;
const reverseString = str => str.split('').reverse().join('');
return inputString.replace(regex, match =>
'\u202E' + reverseString(match) + '\u202C');
}
- jazzyjackson 3y agowow i've never thought of endianness as handedness, it's less esoteric that way.