[ih] Erratum in IEN 37

[Brian E Carpenter]

As a curious side effect of some unusually acrimonious April 1st traffic in IETFland related to Jonathan Swift, I happened to go looking for IEN 37 to check on the big-endian/little-endian controversy that Danny Cohen settled therein. (He was certainly a wise man when it came to settling acrimonious debates.)

The problem I'm now grappling with is that Danny made one error, and there seems to be no errata process for IENs, so I thought I'd report it here, with the greatest respect to Danny's memory.

IEN 37 says:

> In English, we write numbers in Big-Endians' left-to-right order. I
> believe that this is because we SAY numbers in the Big-Endians' order,
> and because we WRITE English in Left-to-right order.

This is wrong. We write numbers in Arabic order (they're called Arabic numerals for a reason). 199 is written ١٩٩ in Arabic. (If that didn't come out right on your screen, your UTF-8 configuration is wrong.) That's big-endian in English script, but little-endian in Arabic right-to-left script (although my understanding is that it's *pronounced* big-endian in Arabic).

Regards
   Brian Carpenter