Not true. In arabic languages you write text R-L, but numbers are L-R.

Arabic numbers are L-R if you have a big-endian mindset, but R-L if you switch to a little-endian mindset :)

No. Arabic numbers are always L-R...

Not exctly accurate, for the part of the number that is < 100, it will always be R-L, as in 25, would be 5 and twenty in Arabic.

Also for the part that is L-R, that is not the rule, as some people still read all the number as R-L (actually in a lot of historical documents that was the case), so the would read 1925 as five and twenty and nine hundred and a thousand. Where is now most people would read it as a thousand, and nine hundred, and five and twenty.

Many R-L languages do the same such as German French, Hindi et al.

I guess you mean L-R. In Dutch and German 1925 is most commonly read as 'nine teen five and twenty' But 2025 as 'two thousand five and twenty'

Wait, Hindi is neither a R-L language nor does it switch directions for text and numbers.

Source: native Hindi speaker.

Yes sorry for too-late-to-edit confusing typo: german Hindi French are all L-R , all big-endian (least significant digit on right) all have numbers which, when spoken, aren’t said in strict digit order.

Do you mean that you read a text from the right to the left, and when you meet a number you jump to is leftmost digit, then read it LR, then jump agzin to its left (where there is a space) and resume reading text?

If you think about it in left-to-right languages reading numbers requires backtracking because you have to see how many digits there are to know if you're reading units, thousands, millions, billions...

Take 12,345,567 for instance, if you want to read it aloud you first have to go all the way to the end to figure out that there are three groups of numbers, so the first one is million, then thousands, then units. If you were only given a truncated version of the number it's impossible to read it aloud. So in a way the arabic represents number actually makes some sense and it could be argue that we write them backwards.

Furthermore IIRC from a discussion with an arabic friend (from the middle east, not sure if it's different in NA) the most formal way of reading numbers aloud is actually backwards (or little endian I guess) compared to the way we do in english. So if I understood correctly for 1,234 you'd say "four and thirty and two hundred and a thousand" or something similar. Don't quote me on that though because I know almost nothing about the arabic language and this is from a discussion I've had many years ago.

Yes.

Exactly: you encounter the least significant digit first as you read.

Honestly I find little endian less confusing. The only confusing thing is how little endian value are written in hex because within each byte they are written as big endian.

Other than that little endian makes more sense. The fact that Arabic numbers are written in big endian is weird. Nobody questions it because it's all anyone is taught.

They aren’t Arabic BTW, they are Hindu positional digits (look at the characterforms you’ll see the connection) which arrived in Europe via the Arabs, hence the name — in Arabic, different character forms are used.

Still doesn't make sense because little endian keeps things reverse in bit groups. It doesn't make sense no matter if you read left-right, right-left, top to bottom or bottom to top.

write out what happens bitwise with a shift on a little endian machine.

from a bytes as representing a bitstring perspective, big endian make sense, and little endian is a terrible scramble.