51–60 of 124 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Belgian French uses septante/nonante. Huitante would be a great addition.
I personally prefer octante. Septante and huitante sounds to much like just slapping -tante to 7 and 8. And just to be coherent, I would love to have heptante for 70.
Much less interesting but I've worked in teams where "zillion" is a shorthand for "followed by all the zeroes that fit in a word of the size we're talking about". So 8 zillion is 0x80000000 if we're talking about a 32 bit address space.
That's weird because 3 zillion is more than 28 zillion.
I have also seen other systems of representing the digits for hexadecimal, such as Nystrom's system (which also includes pronounciation).
And now, looking at Wikipedia, there are more. (The hex intuitor system I mentioned above is also called the Rogers system.)
wondering if anybody gets the hanky code reference in the tweet.
AC is annty-christ
It's amazing what naming conventions are used over time. In the 70's/early 80's "~" was (at least in programming circles in the UK) called a swan-hyphen, today it is often called a tilde. Though I'm sure it has many other names that have come and gone throughout the fashion of time.
Therefore, might your “swan hyphen” be a corruption of an original term “swung hyphen”?
The extra digit names flow well, but I think shoehorning it into the same constructions English decimal numbers use doesn't, mostly because the “-ty”/“-teen” suffixes are too tied both etymologically and phonetically to being “ten”. If I say the word “eighteen”, making it 0x18 in one context and XVIII in another is close in plausible applicability and far in exact meaning, which is about the worst case for avoiding m…
Isn’t an issue what the words for numbers mean? Does thousand mean the quantity itself or does it mean the decimal 1000? In other words thousand = 1000 (dec) and 0x3E8 (hex). Are they both pronounced “thousand”? When someone says mix a thousand liters of glycol with ten kilograms of salt, both 1000 (dec) and 0x3E8 (hex) mean “thousand” each of something. The only way to get around this is if every whole number on the…
Thus, I agree with you, there's value in making digits beyond 9 pronouncable for higher bases (if dealing with them enough to make devising the system worthwhile of course).
In French, and more specifically French as spoken in some areas in Switzerland, there is a very natural way of pronouncing hex numbers: 1 to F are the normal 'un' to 'quinze'. A is 'dix'. 10 is 'seize'. 11 is 'seize et un' etc. Until 1F which is `seize et quinze'. 20 to 2F are 'vingt' until 'vingt et quinze'. Etc. 70, 80 and 90 are called 'septante', 'huitante' (Swiss-specific) and 'nonante'. A0 is 'dixante', then we…
I see no reason this couldn't be applied to English. "-nz(e)", etc. is akin to "-teen", and beyond that it should be exactly the same, with septante/seventy, huitante/eighty, and nonante/ninety being the popular English versions (unlike e.g. Metropolitan French). B78D: Eleven Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Thirteen See also Tolkien's famous hobbit's birthday party.
9: nine
A: ten?
B: eleven
...
10: ten?
20: twenty
30: thirty