On Friday 04 June 2010 12:43:33 pm Kenneth Whistler wrote: > And that is why prefixes such as "0x" were invented, so as > to disambiguate explicitly in contexts where syntax or > explicit type do not. Ordinary language usage wouldn't ordinarily > countenance this kind of ambiguity anyway -- it is a completely > artificial example.
The whole point is to get the tonal/hexadecimal number system adopted for ordinary everyday use. This kind of ambiguity is an obstacle. > > Just two examples I can think of offhand that make a-f insufficient. > > ASCII a-f to express hexadecimal digits are standard in every > significant programming language syntax, as well as for numeric > character references that are used ubiquitously now to refer to > characters in HTML and XML. So I'd say they are probably > sufficient for some millions of programmers and some hundreds of > millions of web users. But again, I'm not talking about programming. My four year old can grasp tonal just as well as she could decimal had I been teaching that. Now if I were using the a-f notation, she would be (reasonably) confused as to why *some* numbers are unique, but *other* numbers are also letters.
