Arabic numerals in its entry in the "Oxford English Dictionary", which helps to distinguish it from "Arabic numerals" as the Eastern Arabic numerals. Alternative names are Western Arabic numerals, Western numerals, Hindu–Arabic numerals and Unicode calls them digits. The decimal Hindu–Arabic numeral system with zero was developed in India by around AD 700. The development was gradual, spanning several centuries, but the decisive step was probably provided by Brahmagupta's formulation of zero as a number in AD 628. The system was revolutionary by including zero in positional notation, thereby limiting the number of individual digits to ten. It is considered an important
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