On 4 Jun 2010, at 20:39, Luke-Jr wrote:
Unicode has Roman numerals and bar counting (base 0); why should
base 16 be
denied unique characters?
Anyway, if you can show these John Nystrom Tonal System glyphs have
been in textual use, perhaps they should be encoded.
From another perspective, the English-language Arabic-numeral world
came up
with ASCII. Unicode was created to unlimit the character set to
include
coverage of other languages' characters. Why shouldn't a variety of
numeric
systems also be supported?
As for the question of usability, mathematical symbols typically start
off as some common symbol and gradually evolve being specially
mathematical. See for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_(number)#Evolution_of_the_glyph
Right now, there is no particular need for having special hexadecimal
symbols - the letters A-F work just fine. Also, there is no particular
with base 16. For example, in GMP <http://gmplib.org/> one can use use
any base, I recall, as long as there are letters. Historically, base
60 has been in use - we still use it in clocks. Some people (Danish,
French) use base 20 when counting. Since ancient times, one has used
binary multiplication Ethiopia. So there are number of different
number systems already in use.
Hexadecimal representation is only used to give a compact
representation of binary numbers in connection of computers. In view
of modern fast computers, one only needs to write out numbers when
interfacing with humans. Then one can easily make the computer write
or read what humans are used to. So there is no particular need to
switch to another base than ten if that is what humans prefer. Base 16
is easier when one for some reason needs to think about the binary
representation.
But if humans in the future would use base 16 a lot, it might be
convenient to have special symbols for them. Then the typical would be
that glyphs becoming some alteration of A-F.
Hans
