[ih] Erratum in IEN 37

[Vint Cerf]

If we had maintained the IEN list and were still publishing, I suppose you
could have published an erratum as a new IEN.
I suppose you could publish an independent stream RFC referring to the IEN.
We might also need to re-publish the IEN as an informational RFC.

v


On Wed, Apr 7, 2021 at 1:33 AM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


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