Re: Hexadecimal characters.

From: Tom Finch (thinkit8@lycos.com)
Date: Thu Jun 20 2002 - 19:01:48 EDT


 

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On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:14:13 Rick McGowan wrote: >Tom Finch wrote: > >> Hexadecimal is very important and deserves to be in Plane 0. > >Hmmm, well.. In this case, importance has nothing to do with it, and going >off on a comparison of the importance of Devanagari as opposed to Hex will >not prevail in this discussion.

Agreed. >Hex is already representable with characters in plane zero, as people have >been pointing out. There are the ten digits 0-9 and the letters A-F. >People have explained this, and why your proposal would be confusing and >not cater to legacy data. > >What is the problem you are trying to solve by encoding 16 things in a >row? And how would people convert their legacy data forward while avoiding >confusion, etc? And how do you proposal to deal with multiple >representation problems? Legacy data? > > Rick

Another example might be superscript 4 (2074h). You already can say 2^4 for sixteen, but the new character allows you to say it easier. Further, there already is multiple representation problems--A-F as well as a-f.

The problem being solved is properly supporting the base sixteen system. Multiple representation is a problem as you say so yourself, and the current way cannot avoid this (A-F or a-f). Also using letters to stand for numeric data can lead to confusion--this is BAD. Legacy data will be dealt with by accepting the old system as long as necessary.

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