Jon Hanna wrote: > > > From a practical standpoint, I think it is more likely that the base will > > change rather than the hex characters. > > After all, digits have been constant for a long time, but the base has > > changed. Initially it was binary, then it was octal, and now hex > > arithmetic is > > common. > > No, first it was binary, then it was binary and now its binary. Different > human-readable formats have been (and continue to be) used to represent > this. > > It seems more likely to me that we might switch to > > another base (32? > > 64?) as platforms expand, before we started adding redundant > > characters to hex > > arithmetic. > > What human-readability advantages (the only reason we use hex) would base 32 > or base 64 representations have over hex? They aren't matched by a nice > number of bits for most systems;
Only density. You are right 256 would be a more convenient base. Fortunately with Unicode ransacking alphabets is easy! Jon I was mostly being tongue in cheek and contrasting that relative to needing new hex digits, a base change was more likely. However, I wasn't saying that a base change is likely. tex the reason for using hex rather than octal > is that 2 hex digits can exactly represent the range of a octet (the most > common size of bytes these days) and by extension of any word composed of an > integral number of octets. The next base to have that quality is base 256, > which would require us to ransack a few different alphabets and then maybe > create a few symbols in order for us to represent it. -- ------------------------------------------------------------- Tex Texin cell: +1 781 789 1898 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Xen Master http://www.i18nGuy.com XenCraft http://www.XenCraft.com Making e-Business Work Around the World -------------------------------------------------------------
