Arabic numerals Libya to Morocco. Arabs, on the other hand, call the base-10 system (not just these digits) "Hindu numerals", referring to their origin in India. This is not to be confused with what the Arabs call the "Hindi numerals", namely the Eastern Arabic numerals ( - - - - - - - - - ) used in the Middle East, or any of the numerals currently used in Indian languages (e.g. Devanagari: ). The European acceptance of the numerals was accelerated by the invention of the printing press, and they became widely known during the 15th century. Early evidence of their
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