Re: extracting front bits from an unsigned long long?

In article <1131835280.585770.326330@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
slebetman@xxxxxxxxx <slebetman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Haven't had much experience with non-native english speakers have you?
>In a lot of eastern languages front and first are synonyms.

They are often synonyms in English. In particular, when objects are
moving along a path, the front one will be the first one. But when
(as is the case here) the idea is of looking at a static sequence of
objects, the situation is less clear. "3" is the first digit of 315
when you read or write it, but if you imagine the sequence itself
pointing in left-to-right order (i.e. English reading order) then you
would call "5" the front digit.

In such circumstances it is better to be explicit and say "leftmost",
or if you don't even want to commit to a particular writing direction,
"most significant".

-- Richard
.

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