Subject: Re: [lojban] periodic hexadecimal reminder

From: "James F. Carter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 10:24:40 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 26 Sep 2001 [email-masked] wrote:
> this is just a post to remind everyone that hexadecimal is the
> future, and lojban is by default hexadecimal. rafsi will be assigned
> for dau-vai, and "ju'u dau" will be used for references to the old
> way of doing things.

Well... I think number bases are kind of off topic for Lojban, and I
wouldn't like to see a big flame war on this topic overload my mailbox.

Having written a libc instance including printf and scanf (with a
proprietary extension for generalized radix), plus some pretty bizarre
stuff for S/360 (yes, that ancient) involving megadigits and decimal
arithmetic, I can say from experience that for the computer the choice of
radix is not a big deal. For greatest human convenience, maximizing the
number of integral divisors of the radix is important, and duodecimal
stands out in that property.

In a piece of fiction my characters had seven tentacles and used a heptal
number system. I really think this is the most important consideration in
picking the radix: the number of appendages on the user. On the boss user,
and *we* are the boss of the computers.

Drifting off topic again: in heptal or duodecimal or decimal or hex or
whatever, how do you write the radix? 10, of course. The solution I used
in the proprietary radix extension was to have the user specify radix-1,
that is, 6 -> heptal, f -> hex, 9 -> decimal, etc.

James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: [email-masked] http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)