Re: Hexadecimal digits

From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Fri Jun 04 2010 - 13:28:21 CDT

  • Next message: Luke-Jr: "Re: Hexadecimal digits"

    Luke-jr wrote,

    > Hexadecimal/tonal will never be popularised as long as it can be confused with letters...
    >

    and

    > But I'm not talking about programming languages, just common everyday uses by people who have it as their primary (not secondary) system of numbers.

    Hexadecimal already is popular with programmers in programming
    situations. It's useful enough for dealing with computers that
    programmers have adopted it despite the "shortcoming" of being
    potentially confusable. People use complicated and potentially confusing
    systems all the time because to not use them would mean that (a) they
    can no longer communicate with everyone else and/or (b) they would
    represent an unnecessary discontinuity with all past usage, and thus
    people would lose touch with their history and literature. In the
    absence of cultural disasters, that doesn't typically happen on short
    time scales. (Look, for example, at the Japanese writing system.)

    Hexadecimal/tonal will never be popular with ordinary humans for
    ordinary counting in social situations because people don't have ten
    fingers and nobody uses hexadecimal for ordinary counting, nor has any
    significant population ever done so, as far as I know.

    Just out of curiosity, why do you think it's useful or important for
    people to use hexadecimal as their primary system of counting? What
    advantages would it confer?

    (As usual on this list, this reflects purely my personal opinion.)

         Rick



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