Luke-jr wrote,
Hexadecimal/tonal will never be popularised as long as it can be confused with
letters...
and
But I'm not talking about programming languages, just common everyday uses by
people who have it as their primary (not secondary) system of numbers.
Hexadecimal already is popular with programmers in programming
situations. It's useful enough for dealing with computers that
programmers have adopted it despite the "shortcoming" of being
potentially confusable. People use complicated and potentially confusing
systems all the time because to not use them would mean that (a) they
can no longer communicate with everyone else and/or (b) they would
represent an unnecessary discontinuity with all past usage, and thus
people would lose touch with their history and literature. In the
absence of cultural disasters, that doesn't typically happen on short
time scales. (Look, for example, at the Japanese writing system.)
Hexadecimal/tonal will never be popular with ordinary humans for
ordinary counting in social situations because people don't have ten
fingers and nobody uses hexadecimal for ordinary counting, nor has any
significant population ever done so, as far as I know.
Just out of curiosity, why do you think it's useful or important for
people to use hexadecimal as their primary system of counting? What
advantages would it confer?
(As usual on this list, this reflects purely my personal opinion.)
Rick
