Re: Hexadecimal digits

From: Hans Aberg (haberg-1@telia.com)
Date: Fri Jun 04 2010 - 16:45:57 CDT

  • Next message: Shawn Steele: "RE: Hexadecimal digits"

    On 4 Jun 2010, at 20:39, Luke-Jr wrote:

    > Unicode has Roman numerals and bar counting (base 0); why should
    > base 16 be
    > denied unique characters?

    Anyway, if you can show these John Nystrom Tonal System glyphs have
    been in textual use, perhaps they should be encoded.

    > From another perspective, the English-language Arabic-numeral world
    > came up
    > with ASCII. Unicode was created to unlimit the character set to
    > include
    > coverage of other languages' characters. Why shouldn't a variety of
    > numeric
    > systems also be supported?

    As for the question of usability, mathematical symbols typically start
    off as some common symbol and gradually evolve being specially
    mathematical. See for example
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_(number)#Evolution_of_the_glyph

    Right now, there is no particular need for having special hexadecimal
    symbols - the letters A-F work just fine. Also, there is no particular
    with base 16. For example, in GMP <http://gmplib.org/> one can use use
    any base, I recall, as long as there are letters. Historically, base
    60 has been in use - we still use it in clocks. Some people (Danish,
    French) use base 20 when counting. Since ancient times, one has used
    binary multiplication Ethiopia. So there are number of different
    number systems already in use.

    Hexadecimal representation is only used to give a compact
    representation of binary numbers in connection of computers. In view
    of modern fast computers, one only needs to write out numbers when
    interfacing with humans. Then one can easily make the computer write
    or read what humans are used to. So there is no particular need to
    switch to another base than ten if that is what humans prefer. Base 16
    is easier when one for some reason needs to think about the binary
    representation.

    But if humans in the future would use base 16 a lot, it might be
    convenient to have special symbols for them. Then the typical would be
    that glyphs becoming some alteration of A-F.

       Hans



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