At least I got something started. This article is in the same spirit the
Datastick Systems was started. e.g. Did something, got a lot of interest,
was told how to do it "right" and making a fortune from it! :)
I didn't want to bring up octal since there was enough confusion. Octal has
gone the wayside since a single hex digit can represent four bytes and two
hex digits conveniently represents a single byte.
Steve
Mark Nudelman wrote:
> Steve Sabram wrote:
> > However, 10 is not a multiple of 2 and thus more code
> > needed to be written for proper representation.
>
> Since everyone is nitpicking on the details of Steve's nice article,
> I'll try to be the first to point out that 10 *is* a multiple of 2. You
> meant "10 is not a power of 2".
Thanks. Now you know why I never bothered with graduate school! :)
>
>
> And, to try to contribute something besides criticism, I'll add that
> octal (base 8) was a popular way to represent numbers for a while. It
> has the advantage over hex that it uses only normal decimal digits
> (0...7) and doesn't need alphabetic characters to stand for digits. I
> guess it's main disadvantage is that 8, 16 and 32 bit numbers aren't
> represented by an integral number of octal digits, as they are in hex.
> Also numbers are usually longer in octal than in hex.
> --Mark
