Arabic numerals different values, but also had the lower 4 bits equal to the digit value. Arabic numerals Arabic numerals, also called Hindu–Arabic numerals, are the ten digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; or numerals written using them in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system (where the position of a digit indicates the power of 10 to multiply it by). It is the most common system for the symbolic representation of numbers in the world today. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system was developed by Indian mathematicians around AD 500 using quite different forms of the numerals. From India, the system
Arabic numerals variants since the Middle Ages: The evolution of the numerals in early Europe is shown here in a table created by the French scholar Jean-Étienne Montucla in his "Histoire de la Mathematique", which was published in 1757: The Arabic numerals 0–9 are encoded in ASCII at positions 0x30 to 0x39. Masking to the lower 4 binary bits (or taking the last hexadecimal digit) gives the value of the digit, a great help in converting text to numbers on early computers. These positions were inherited in Unicode and in virtually all other encodings based in any way on ASCII. EBCDIC used