alt Hacker NewsIn Britain the standard way to write a date has always been, e.g "12th March 2023” or 12/3/2023 for short. Don't think there's a standard for where to put the time, though, I can imagine it both before and after.
Doing numbers little-endian does make more sense. It's weird that we switch to RTL when doing arithmetic. Amusingly the Wikipedia page for Hindu-Arabic numeral system claims that their RTL scripts switch to LTR for numbers. Nope... the inventors of our numeral system used little-endian and we forgot to reverse it for our LTR scripts...
Edit: I had to pull out Knuth here (vol. 2). So apparently the original Hindu scripts were LTR, like Latin, and Arabic is RTL. According to Knuth the earliest known Hindu manuscripts have the numbers "backwards", meaning most significant digit at the right, but soon switched to most significant at the left. So I read that as starting in little-endian but switching to big-endian.
These were later translated to Arabic (RTL), but the order of writing numbers remained the same, so became little-endian ("backwards").
Later still the numerals were introduced into Latin but, again, the order remained the same, so becoming big-endian again.
We in India use the same system for dates as you described, for obvious reasons. But I really don't like the pattern of switching directions multiple times when reading a date and time.
And as for numbers, perhaps it isn't too late to set it right once and for all. The French did that with the SI system after all.
> So apparently the original Hindu scripts were LTR
I can confirm. All Indian scripts are LTR (Though there are quite a few of them. I'm not aware of any exceptions). All of them seem to have evolved from an ancient and now extinct script named Brahmi. That one was LTR. It's unlikely to have switched direction any time during subsequent evolution into modern scripts.