>But I agree that the customary use of A-F for hexadecimal makes
>it more difficult to read. I stuck with octal for many years because
>of this before giving up to the tide of the culture, even taught my
>nephews. Octal is so much simpler, just like decimal if you have
>no thumbs, as Tom Lehrer sang.
>
But four bits are a much better match to computer architecture, and it's
not often recognized that they are arguably a better fit to human
architecture than octal or decimal: use your thumbs to hold down the
appropriate combination of fingers (the zero bits), and you can place one
hxadecimal digit on each hand, allowing you to count from 0 to 255 on two
hands! :-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:05 EDT