Re: Hexadecimal digits

From: Luke-Jr (luke@dashjr.org)
Date: Fri Jun 04 2010 - 15:48:42 CDT

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    On Friday 04 June 2010 03:26:45 pm Philippe Verdy wrote:
    > The real need would be is we started to count, in our natural life, in
    > a binary system like hexadecimal: there would still be the need to use
    > it unambiguously with decimal numbers, so that numbers written like
    > "10" would still remain unambiguosuly interpreted as ten and not
    > sixteen: to avoid this problem, we would also need another set of
    > digits for 0-9. Or we would have to use another additonal notation
    > such as some diacritic

    I agree, but I'm busy enough without having to invent/develop a new system.
    The Tonal system already exists, and works well enough.

    > The other major problem will be linguistic : to make the hexadecimal
    > convenient, we would also need to have other names than "ten",
    > "twenty", unless we keep their meaning but forbid combining them in
    > sequences like "twenty one" which would still be interpreted in a
    > decimal system. So we would need new names for powers of 16, even if
    > we keep the names we have for 0..9 and possibly more (ten, eleven,
    > twelve are possible in English, thirteen would prebably be
    > disqualified as a unit name; in French we could keep dix, onze, douze,
    > treize, quatorze, quinze for the hexadecimal units; all other names
    > for powers of 10 and their multiples would be disqualified in the new
    > naming as they would not translate easily in the hexadecimal system).

    The Tonal system gives new pronunciations to all the digits.

    > So my opinion is then that, if digits were added for hexadecimal
    > notations, they should all be encoded for the full range 0..15, not
    > just the range 10..15, and in an unbroken sequence.

    Again, if I were creating my own system, sure... Tonal reencodes 9..15.

    > But before that, we would still first need to invent and use new names
    > for powers of sixteen, and a rational way to name reasonnably large
    > numbers in this system (at least up to 64-bit), including for
    > fractions of unity ; this has already started in the metric units used
    > in the computing industry, by the adoption of binary-based prefixes
    > for measure names (kibi, mebi, gibi, ...) instead of the 10-based
    > prefixes (kilo, mega, giga...), and the new recommendation of
    > abbreviated symbols for these prefixes for multiples/submultiples
    > (appending a lowercase "i" after the initial : "Ki, "Mi, Gi..."
    > instead of just "k, M, G...")

    The computer industry already has units of 'kilobyte' and such referring to
    powers of 1024. Being a supporter of hexadecimal, I am of course also
    anti-metric and anti-SI-- including insisting that 1024 bytes is a KB :)

    On a side note, I'm planning to get a new hard drive at least san (this is a
    single digit, but due to deficiencies in Unicode I must spell it out ;) tB
    (tambyte) in size sometime soon.



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