> While I jest somewhat, that highlights a serious deficiency in my > education that becomes more and more apparent, which is in maths.
Yes, its a sad fact. Good programming beyond basics does require a modicum of maths. You can learnn enough to do useful things without math, but there reaches a point when math becomes essential. Its no coincidence that at university Computing was traditionally (up till the late 70's at least) a branch of mathematics. > But the remainder thing - would this be why we read binary the way we do? > > 4 is 001 (on a continuum of 2^0 to 2^n), but using the above approach > we get 100. Not really. The reason we read 4 as 100 is the same reason we read 400 as 400 instead of 004 - we traditionally put the most significant part tothe left since we (in English at least) read from left to right. 400 = 4x10**2 + 0x10**1 + 0x10**0 110 = 1x2**2 + 0x2**1 + 0x2**0 But if we convert back again we can generate the number 400 from the value 400 by the same technique we saw for binary: 400/10 = 40 rem 0 40/10 = 4 rem 0 4/10 = 0 rem 4 So reading remainders bottom up we get 400, which is the decimal representation of 400! :-) So the algorithm is identical, we can write a generic function to convert a value into a representation if we pass in the value and base. Alan G. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
