Our modern number system allows us to express numbers in an efficient and uniform manner, which makes it easy to compare one number with another and to perform the arithmetical operations that arise through counting. In the day-to-day world, we employ base ten for all our arithmetic, that is to say we count by tens, and we do that for the accidental reason that we have ten digits on our hands. What makes our number system so effective, however, is not our particular choice of base but rather the use of positional value in number representation, where the value of a numeral depends on its place in the number string. For example,1984 is short for 4 ones plus 8 lots of ten plus 9 hundreds plus 1 thousand.