From: Tex Texin (tex@i18nguy.com)
Date: Wed Aug 20 2003 - 12:02:43 EDT
Jon Hanna wrote:
>
> > From a practical standpoint, I think it is more likely that the base will
> > change rather than the hex characters.
> > After all, digits have been constant for a long time, but the base has
> > changed. Initially it was binary, then it was octal, and now hex
> > arithmetic is
> > common.
>
> No, first it was binary, then it was binary and now its binary. Different
> human-readable formats have been (and continue to be) used to represent
> this.
>
> It seems more likely to me that we might switch to
> > another base (32?
> > 64?) as platforms expand, before we started adding redundant
> > characters to hex
> > arithmetic.
>
> What human-readability advantages (the only reason we use hex) would base 32
> or base 64 representations have over hex? They aren't matched by a nice
> number of bits for most systems;
Only density. You are right 256 would be a more convenient base.
Fortunately with Unicode ransacking alphabets is easy!
Jon I was mostly being tongue in cheek and contrasting that relative to
needing new hex digits, a base change was more likely. However, I wasn't
saying that a base change is likely.
tex
the reason for using hex rather than octal
> is that 2 hex digits can exactly represent the range of a octet (the most
> common size of bytes these days) and by extension of any word composed of an
> integral number of octets. The next base to have that quality is base 256,
> which would require us to ransack a few different alphabets and then maybe
> create a few symbols in order for us to represent it.
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