Hacker News Reader

Comment by squiggleblaz | Hacker News Reader

The address there is

Russia, Moscow, (postcode), (maybe a street name), (some number), (untranslated) Svetlane

So it seems to be backwards: The personal name is last, and the country/city is first. Does someone here perhaps know if that is the customary order of address in Russia, or if it was reversed too?

View on HN

In the whole of USSR (and after its dissolution too), the order of addresses was big-endian: from the larger administrative unit to smaller (which seems quite logical — first you enter the country, then find the district, then the town, then the street, then the house, then the person therein, thus the address replicates the travel path of the package).

Some countries (doubtless those that entered EU, also Ukraine, can’t say for the rest) officially changed the order to be little-endian, but many older folks, who still use snail mail and write letters and postcards, don’t bother.

I think you're mixing up endianness. The way I understand it, your first paragraph actually describes little endian encoding. I understand it as "the little value (i.e., the insignificant value) at the end".

EDIT: In fact maybe I'm wrong, if you consider the lowest byte address the first line of an address label... now I'm confused, haha.

From Wikipedia:

>A big-endian system stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest. A little-endian system, in contrast, stores the least-significant byte at the smallest address.

So if you count the address "fields" from top to bottom in ascending order, putting the country first and street address last would be big-endian. If you put the street address first and the country last, that'd be little-endian.

Yeah it doesn't make that much sense to me either.

I was aware such an ordering was common in China, but thanks for that info about the USSR! It is a more consistent and logical ordering. The other ordering is so confusing that America and Europe have both adopted different mixed endian schemes, which just makes things worse. Consistently increasing-endian schemes are quite rare, but I think you can find one in Australia.

Welcome to the fun that is address field localization. Some countries have house numbers first, and some have it at the end.

742 Evergreen Terrace vs. Platz der Republik 1.

Google's Contacts app just has a text field and lets Google Maps take care of the parsing.

I mean yes, I'm aware different countries do address differently, and that a person should not prematurely predetermine the fields of an address on international software.

I had asked a specific question, which your comment does not address.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com