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Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

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Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#82

Post by dragontamer »

unfreezingly wrote: post #60
lucideer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love this system, but how do you deal with the ambiguity around "ten"? 9: nine A: ten? B: eleven ... 10: ten? 20: twenty 30: thirty

    9: nine
    A: ten
    B: eleven
    ...
    10: hexTen
    20: hexTwenty
    30: hexThirty
    ...
    100: hexHundred
My issue is that 1000 is hexThousand, but when working with hex numbers, its far more logical to group them in 4s.

0x10000 is a number more deserving of a name than 0x1000.

In effect, I want to call 0x10000 as "hex-thousand" (correlating to the number where 16-bits overflow). And 0x100000000 as "hex-million" (correlating to the 32-bit overflow number).

Of course, that leaves 0x1000 and 0x1000000 as ambiguous.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#83

Post by psc2 »

reaperducer wrote: post #33

I'll have to tell my A01C about these. And while we're talking hex semantics, is it just me being old, or do lower case letters in hex values bother anyone else? The only time I've been OK with this is when I've had to work with machines that only have seven-segment displays.

RFC 5952: A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation

says "The characters "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", and "f" in an IPv6 address MUST be represented in lowercase "[1]

One Reason for this, is that it can avoid redundancy if you submit a hexdecimal nummber by phone.

"However, when a letter is spelled uppercase,people tend to specify that it is uppercase, which is unnecessary information."[2]

If you care about typography and think mixing lower-case letters with upper-case numbers, you could argue, that oldstyle numbners aka. lower-case numbers could be a better fit.

[1]https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5952#section-4.3

[2]https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5952#section-3.3.3

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#84

Post by combatentropy »

countryqt30 wrote: post #74

I totally fail the point of this article. Why not just say A, B, C, D, E, F as the letters that they are? Works perfectly fine. 1F is just a two-syllable word. Just like "fiftysix" is.

Is it to better distinguish them, like the phonetic alphabet?

These letters all rhyme: B, C, D, and E. "Did you say 1B or 1D?"

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#85

Post by thanhhaimai »

Would anyone please help me understand the benefits of this? :).

This approach (and other approaches proposed in this thread) seems to add complexity but it's not that much better than just reading the characters normally.

> B78D would be 'onze mille sept cents huitante treize'

Or just read it: B, 7, 8, D. To space out a long hex number, read it in group of 4, with a pause.

The approach, other than it's not being shorter, also risks miscommunication due to the receiver might not be familiar with it, or due to the sound system has multiple very similar sounds (but totally will change the meaning when misheard) like -teen and -ty.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#86

Post by reaperducer »

psc2 wrote: post #83
reaperducer wrote: post #33

I'll have to tell my A01C about these. And while we're talking hex semantics, is it just me being old, or do lower case letters in hex values bother anyone else? The only time I've been OK with this is when I've had to work with machines that only have seven-segment displays.

RFC 5952: A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation says "The characters "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", and "f" in an IPv6 address MUST be represented in lowercase "[1] One Reason for this, is that it can avoid redundancy if you submit a hexdecimal nummber by phone. "However, when a letter is spelled uppercase,people tend to specify that it is uppercase, which is unnecessary information."[2] If you care about t…

Since the RFC came 42 years after the magazine article, and 27 years after I sold my first computer program (with data in hex), I'll just consider myself old fashioned.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#87

Post by apocolyps6 »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #85

Would anyone please help me understand the benefits of this? :). This approach (and other approaches proposed in this thread) seems to add complexity but it's not that much better than just reading the characters normally. > B78D would be 'onze mille sept cents huitante treize' Or just read it: B, 7, 8, D. To space out a long hex number, read it in group of 4, with a pause. The approach, other than it's not being sho…

Don't you think that's a bit of a strawman? The user is explaining how that number is pronounced in their native Swiss French. Clearly nobody is suggesting you have to learn French to say some numbers.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#88

Post by Izkata »

reaperducer wrote: post #46
XaspR8d wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to prefer lowercase since it reduces the number of confusable characters, especially in handwriting (8/B, 0/D, 4/A), but I can understand that numbers might typographically or semantically feel uppercase, so lowercase A-F creates a MIxEd cASe looK. Is uppercase the older tradition? I'm ~30yo and I've been seeing both for as long as I remember.

In my experience, it was always upper case until around the time CSS was introduced. The article pictured has it in upper case and it's from 1968.

HTML was as well, before CSS became commonplace. I still reflexively do it on occasion when writing a root page (html/head/title/body tags).

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#90

Post by kazinator »

These are quite silly things. Firstly, why invent words instead of just using the ltters. Obviously A creates an ambiguity with "eight", but other than that, things are fine. Perhaps A should be "aye".

The "teen" suffix is wrong; it specifically means "ten". For instance thirteen means three+ten, so it is inappropriate to pronounce 0x13 as "thirteen". So that is to say, the pronunciation issue does not begin at 1A; we shouldn't call 0x19 "nineteen", but something else.

Similarly 0x30 shouldn't be "thirty" because that word means three times ten.

There shouldn't be any common words between hex pronunciation and decimal that denote a different integer. If we say "hundred" and the context is really clear, it can be understood as 0x100, but the context isn't always clear. Attaching "hex" after every ambiguous wording ("hundred thirty-one hex" for 0x131) is verbose. How about:

   8: eight
   9: nine
   A: aye
   B: bee
   C: cee
   ...
   F: eff
  10: hex
  11: heven
  12: helve
  13: thirex
  14: forex
  15: fivex
  16: sixex
  17: sevex
  18: eightex
  19: ninex
  1A: ayex
  1B: behex
  ..
  1F: efex

  20: twexy
  30: trixy
  40: foxy
  50: fixy
  60: sixy
  70: sepsy
  80: oxy
  90: noxy
  A0: ayesy
  B0: beezy
  C0: ceezy
  D0: deezy
  E0: eezy
  F0: efzy

  100: hent (from "cent")
  1000: hil (from "mil")
  10000: han (from 万 (man))
  100000000: hoku (from 億 (oku))

  0xDEADBEEF:  deezy-ee-hent ayesy-dee han beezy-ee-hent eezy-eff.

  0xF00FCBB0:  efzy-hent-eff han, ceezy-bee-hent beezy.
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