On 13 October 2016 at 04:18, Brendan Barnwell <brenb...@brenbarn.net> wrote: > On 2016-10-12 18:56, Mikhail V wrote: >> >> Please don't mix the readability and personal habit, which previuos >> repliers seems to do as well. Those two things has nothing >> to do with each other. > > > You keep saying this, but it's quite incorrect. The usage of > decimal notation is itself just a convention, and the only reason it's easy > for you (and for many other people) is because you're used to it. If you > had grown up using only hexadecimal or binary, you would find decimal > awkward.
Exactly, but this is not called "readability" but rather "acquired ability to read" or simply habit, which does not reflect the "readability" of the character set itself. > There is nothing objectively better about base 10 than any other > place-value numbering system. Sorry to say, but here you are totally wrong. Not to treat you personally for your fallacy, that is quite common among those who are not familiar with the topic, but you should consider some important points: --- 1. Each taken character set has certain grade of readability which depends solely on the form of its units (aka glyphs). 2. Linear string representation is superior to anything else (spiral, arc, etc.) 3. There exist glyphs which provide maximal readability, those are particular glyphs with particular constant form, and this form is absolutely independent from the encoding subject. 4. According to my personal studies (which does not mean it must be accepted or blindly believed in, but I have solid experience in this area and acting quite successful in it) the amount of this glyphs is less then 10, namely I am by 8 glyphs now. 5. Main measured parameter which reflects the readability (somewhat indirect however) is the pair-wize optical collision of each character pair of the set. This refers somewhat to legibility, or differentiation ability of glyphs. --- Less technically, you can understand it better if you think of your own words "There is nothing objectively better about base 10 than any other place-value numbering system." If this could be ever true than you could read with characters that are very similar to each other or something messy as good as with characters which are easily identifyable, collision resistant and optically consistent. But that is absurd, sorry. For numbers obviously you don't need so many character as for speech encoding, so this means that only those glyphs or even a subset of it should be used. This means anything more than 8 characters is quite worthless for reading numbers. Note that I can't provide here the works currently so don't ask me for that. Some of them would be probably available in near future. Your analogy with speech and signs is not correct because speech is different but numbers are numbers. But also for different speech, same character set must be used namely the one with superior optical qualities, readability. > Saying we should dump hex notation because everyone understands decimal is > like saying that all signs in Prague should only be printed in English We should dump hex notation because currently decimal is simply superiour to hex, just like Mercedes is superior to Lada, aand secondly, because it is more common for ALL people, so it is 2:0 for not using such notation. With that said, I am not against base-16 itself in the first place, but rather against the character set which is simply visually inconsistent and not readable. Someone just took arabic digits and added first latin letters to it. It could be forgiven for a schoolboy's exercises in drawing but I fail to understand how it can be accepted as a working notation for medium supposed to be human readable. Practically all this notation does, it reduces the time before you as a programmer become visual and brain impairments. > Just look at the Wikipedia page for Unicode, which says: "Normally a > Unicode code point is referred to by writing "U+" followed by its > hexadecimal number." That's it. Yeah that's it. And it sucks and migrated to coding standard, sucks twice. If a new syntax/standard is decided, there'll be only positive sides of using decimal vs hex. So nobody'll be hurt, this is only the question of remaking current implementation and is proposed only as a long-term theoretical improvement. > it's just > a label that identifies the character. Ok, but if I write a string filtering in Python for example then obviously I use decimal everywhere to compare index ranges, etc. so what is the use for me of that label? Just redundant conversions back and forth. Makes me sick actually. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
