On Friday 04 June 2010 03:26:45 pm Philippe Verdy wrote: > The real need would be is we started to count, in our natural life, in > a binary system like hexadecimal: there would still be the need to use > it unambiguously with decimal numbers, so that numbers written like > "10" would still remain unambiguosuly interpreted as ten and not > sixteen: to avoid this problem, we would also need another set of > digits for 0-9. Or we would have to use another additonal notation > such as some diacritic
I agree, but I'm busy enough without having to invent/develop a new system. The Tonal system already exists, and works well enough. > The other major problem will be linguistic : to make the hexadecimal > convenient, we would also need to have other names than "ten", > "twenty", unless we keep their meaning but forbid combining them in > sequences like "twenty one" which would still be interpreted in a > decimal system. So we would need new names for powers of 16, even if > we keep the names we have for 0..9 and possibly more (ten, eleven, > twelve are possible in English, thirteen would prebably be > disqualified as a unit name; in French we could keep dix, onze, douze, > treize, quatorze, quinze for the hexadecimal units; all other names > for powers of 10 and their multiples would be disqualified in the new > naming as they would not translate easily in the hexadecimal system). The Tonal system gives new pronunciations to all the digits. > So my opinion is then that, if digits were added for hexadecimal > notations, they should all be encoded for the full range 0..15, not > just the range 10..15, and in an unbroken sequence. Again, if I were creating my own system, sure... Tonal reencodes 9..15. > But before that, we would still first need to invent and use new names > for powers of sixteen, and a rational way to name reasonnably large > numbers in this system (at least up to 64-bit), including for > fractions of unity ; this has already started in the metric units used > in the computing industry, by the adoption of binary-based prefixes > for measure names (kibi, mebi, gibi, ...) instead of the 10-based > prefixes (kilo, mega, giga...), and the new recommendation of > abbreviated symbols for these prefixes for multiples/submultiples > (appending a lowercase "i" after the initial : "Ki, "Mi, Gi..." > instead of just "k, M, G...") The computer industry already has units of 'kilobyte' and such referring to powers of 1024. Being a supporter of hexadecimal, I am of course also anti-metric and anti-SI-- including insisting that 1024 bytes is a KB :) On a side note, I'm planning to get a new hard drive at least san (this is a single digit, but due to deficiencies in Unicode I must spell it out ;) tB (tambyte) in size sometime soon.
