Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How domains became backwards

david.newgas.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–39 of 39 posts

Re: How domains became backwards

#31

Post by opminion »

DLWormwood wrote: post #5
opminion wrote: post #3

Funny to think that if Twitter handles were fragments of email addresses they would be backwards: com.twitter@holysee --- By the way, this must be a mistake: This is a clearly a byproduct of the right-to-left language of the designers of these systems

That language is math . Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

I think that you mean "numerals", not math in general.

In our system (and in the Arabic "Indian" system, as pointed out by a fellow reply) numerals are written with the least significative figure to the right, so in that sense it's like com.twitter@holysee.

However, the author has acknowledged that there was a minor error in the post, so this is a case of a retrofitted explanation :-)

In fact, notations do not have to be consistent about digit significance. See, for example, US dates (9/11/2001) or German (and Arabic) long-form of most two digit numerals, which are read backwards, as in "four and twenty blackbirds" (happy to be corrected about Arabic...).

Re: How domains became backwards

#32

Post by leot »

616c wrote: post #30
DLWormwood wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That language is math . Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

Not true, but close enough. Even in Arabic, numbers are the exception, written from left to write. انا من مواليد ١٩٨٦. I was born in 1986. You will notice the number sequencing, although slightly different looking, is the same as in Western orthography. Why? Arabs took their numbering system from the Indians, and adapted it.

The only way in which it makes sense to talk about numbers being written "right to left" or "left to right" is when comparing the order of speech sounds to the ordering of numerals read. In English it goes from the biggest to the smallest: "420" ==> "four hundred and twenty".

Re: How domains became backwards

#34

Post by dman »

wilfra wrote: post #27

"This was basically maintained in one giant text file managed by one organisation." Actually it was managed by one guy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel

Thanks for linking this - Jon has an incredible legacy.

Re: How domains became backwards

#35

Post by rmk2 »

leot wrote: post #32
616c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, but close enough. Even in Arabic, numbers are the exception, written from left to write. انا من مواليد ١٩٨٦. I was born in 1986. You will notice the number sequencing, although slightly different looking, is the same as in Western orthography. Why? Arabs took their numbering system from the Indians, and adapted it.

The only way in which it makes sense to talk about numbers being written "right to left" or "left to right" is when comparing the order of speech sounds to the ordering of numerals read. In English it goes from the biggest to the smallest: "420" ==> "four hundred and twenty".

Then German and Danish are neither left-to-right nor right-to-left, since 123 is einhundertdreiundzwanzig or hundredetreogtyve ("onehundredthreeandtwenty"), so that doesn't seem to work too well, either...

Re: How domains became backwards

#36

Post by Samuel_Michon »

616c wrote: post #30
DLWormwood wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That language is math . Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

Not true, but close enough. Even in Arabic, numbers are the exception, written from left to write. انا من مواليد ١٩٨٦. I was born in 1986. You will notice the number sequencing, although slightly different looking, is the same as in Western orthography. Why? Arabs took their numbering system from the Indians, and adapted it.

"Even in Arabic, numbers are the exception, written from left to write."

This is true in modern times, but in antiquity Arabic and Hebrew numerals were written right-to-left.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad_numerals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_numerals

Re: How domains became backwards

#37

Post by jfb »

anonymfus wrote: post #29
samatman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are good reasons for both of these choices. USENET was a taxonomy, at least in principle, although like any taxonomy of thought you ran into cases like sci.foo.bar and alt.foo.bar fairly often. A taxonomy should be read from general to specific. Email addresses are addresses. The metaphor is a geography, which goes from the specific to the general. Then we have URLS, which go from the specific to the general, h…

Addresses goes from specific to general mostly in countries influenced by British empire. Because international standard require to put city and country at the end, many countries have addresses with mixed order: street, home number, apartment number, city, country.

There are many, many, many people in the world at valid addresses never touched by the British Empire. China, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, &c.

Re: How domains became backwards

#39

Post by bnegreve »

B-Con wrote: post #24
bnegreve wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, the numeric notation is little endian wheras DNSs are big endian.

That's the point. Numeric notation is right-to-left. It was around long before the concept of endianness.

What does it mean to be right-to-left? If it means that least significant values are on the right side and most significant ones on the left side, then domain names are left-to-right (as opposed to numeric notation).
Post reply on HN