"john" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Antoine Leca <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Kenneth Whistler wrote: >>> Brendan suggested: >>>> Antoine Leca <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> From the point of view of character encoding, I don't think it would >> be correct to substitute out either the A/B usage (from hexadecimal >> implementations) > Just for the record: although the most widely known usage is definitively > hexadecimal notation using A through F, the letters A to Z (or a to z, > depending of variying factors) for the "digits" above 10 in base 11 to 36 > are in wide use in the 80's programming languages, including in the > ISO standards for Ada (the base#...# notation) or C (the strtol function, > and the non-Standard itoa/ultoa functions). SPSS (Statistical Package for Social "Sciences") uses (used?) the letters A-X in addition to digits 0-9 for its "portable" file format. But I agree that the customary use of A-F for hexadecimal makes it more difficult to read. I stuck with octal for many years because of this before giving up to the tide of the culture, even taught my nephews. Octal is so much simpler, just like decimal if you have no thumbs, as Tom Lehrer sang. ------------------- Tengwar has only twelve digits, but it looks like it would be easy to hexadecimalize. Just add another curl to eleven to get the digit for twelve. Then an upside-down ten is thirteen, an upside-down eleven is fourteen, and an upside-down twelve is fifteen. The only "problem" with tengwar digits is the units are on the left. What I like about tengwar digits is they come with their own base marks, so they are ideal for doing math in different number bases. For hex numbers, a good base mark might be hats or something. ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1
