numeralencoding

Numeral encoding is the set of practices by which numbers are represented, stored, and rendered in digital systems. It covers both the binary encoding of numeric values used by computers and the glyph-based encodings used for human-readable text that contains digits and numbers.

In computing, numbers are typically stored in binary formats: fixed-size integers (unsigned or signed, often two's complement), and floating-point values following IEEE 754. For data interchange, numbers may be transmitted as decimal strings or encoded with compact schemes such as variable-length integers (varint) or packed decimal/BCD in specialized hardware. Different bases are used conceptually: base-2 for internal processing, base-10 and base-16 for representation and debugging, with octal historically common in some environments.

Character encodings for numerals: For display, digit glyphs are carried by character encodings such as ASCII (digits 0–9) and Unicode, which provides digits across many scripts (for example Arabic-Indic, Devanagari, Bengali). Each digit has a numeric value in standards independent of its glyph. Rendering requires fonts and shaping engines to map code points to glyphs, and to ensure correct locale-specific formatting and directionality where applicable.

Localization and interoperability: Numeral encoding affects globalization, input methods, data formats, and software localization. Programs must handle numeric data in a way that keeps arithmetic integrity while presenting culturally appropriate numeral forms, and ensure consistent interpretation across systems that may use different encodings or endianness.

In essence, numeral encoding connects low-level binary representations with high-level numeral text and scripts, spanning numerical bases, encoding schemes, and script-specific digit glyphs.