From: Ken Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Mar 08 2011 - 13:32:14 CST
On 3/7/2011 9:28 PM, Tiago Estill de Noronha wrote:
>
> How about assigning a whole plane (one of the currently unassigned
> ones) for digit characters, starting from the digit for zero at the
> beggining and going up in sequence; without defining the actual
> appearance of the digits (different fonts would draw them their own
> way). This wouldn't deal with ambiguity between different bases, but
> would allow standardsation of digits for writing numbers in lots of
> bases, all the way up to somewhere around base 65535
>
Not gonna happen.
>
> What do you think?
>
Not a good idea. What problem is it trying to solve?
There are perfectly valid, widespread and agreed upon notations for decimal,
binary, hexadecimal, and octal numbers, using existing characters. There are
a few advocates for duodecimal systems who want special symbols for 10
and 11,
or who want some other special encoding.
But who needs special characters to express base 4199 numbers?
And even if you did, there are mathematical conventions which have been in
place for a long time for representing numbers in other than decimal radix
notation. Encoding special characters to express digits for arbitrary radix
numbers accomplishes nothing but to miss the actual expressive power
and generality of mathematical notation.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Base.html
--Ken
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