wright@stellar.COM (David Wright @stellar) (08/14/89)
My, my, my, I do seem to have stirred up the natives of this quaint newsgroup with My Little Posting [this is a new toy, closely related to My Little Pony] about how easy it is to do arithmetic in hex. I got several pieces of mail and a couple of postings. To wit: In article <3144@blake.acs.washington.edu>, mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin) writes: >Yay-ah, buckie boy, ah know what ol' hex is. Ahm jest a young'un in >computing 'cuz ah've only done it fer 18 years... Which is about the same length of time I've been doing it, BTW. >It is much more difficult to do arithmetic in hex. You have to remember >glyphs that are not used in the human (decimal) counting system (A through >F), their bit patterns, and their arithmetic rules. I can probably tell >you that the bit pattern 111010011110111001100010110000001101 is >723671426015 octal much faster than you can tell me it is E9EE62C0D hex. Perhaps, but I've only used hex in any significant way since I got to this job (less than six months ago), though I used to see it once in a while on IBM mainframes. In any case, I am taking issue with statements like hex is "much" harder to do arithmetic in. In a year or so, I expect to be able to work in hex about as fast as I could work in octal before. In any case, there are other considerations, e.g. that octal is apt to be a poor choice on a 16-bit machine. (The above example is a 36-bitter, and you just don't see them that much any more. I miss them, though. It's a pain to read 36 bits regardless.) >Fortunately, along with the creeping imposition of hexadecimal on all >modern computers have come tools such that it's virtually never >necessary to do any *human work* in hex. Oh, I don't know. We OS hackers still do it on occasion. But we also have xcalc, etc, to lighten the load. I certainly don't miss toggling programs in by hand. Computers are for doing the grunt work, however much of a feeling of smug satisfaction we may get from knowing we could do it ourselves if we had to. In closing, let me note that I went back and reparsed the offending sentences from the original posting, and I now see the ambiguity more clearly. But let's just agree to disagree. -- David Wright, Stellar Computer Inc wright@stellar.stellar.com or uunet!stellar!wright "But where indeed is the ambiguity -- over there, in a box." -- Monty Python