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Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

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Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#91

Post by thanhhaimai »

apocolyps6 wrote: post #87
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.

I think this might be the disconnect between us. From my point of view as a non-native English speaker, the approach proposed in the tweet and that Swiss French system both requires the user to learn a new system. To me, both of that carry more drawbacks than just reading the hex character by character, in a group of 4.

I can give an example using the system in the tweet:

2F3E: twenty frost thirty ernest -- longer to read, 7 sounds.

2F3E: 2, F, 3, E -- shorter to read, 4 sounds.

Looking at that, I don't see the benefits and trade offs of that new complexity, and that's why I asked for help :)

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#92

Post by svachalek »

interfixus wrote: post #72
rtkwe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no where near as clear as the chinese version which is literally five tens though. To know fifty is 50 and five tens you have to already know both the meaning of number places and what fifty means, really hard to derive from just the name or seeing 50 written out.

Well, I'm not a native speaker. All I can say is it was crystal clear to me when I began learning English at age ten.

As a native speaker I'm with you. Always seemed pretty obvious to me too, especially above 5 with six-ty seven-ty etc. To be fair though, Chinese says/writes 15 as ten-five which is much more obvious than the difference between five-ty and five-teen. It's interesting in spoken English the emphasis flips between first to second syllable though.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#93

Post by smrq »

dragontamer wrote: post #82
unfreezingly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess the language you're looking for is Japanese, then. (Or Chinese?)

1=一 ichi

10=十 juu

100=百 hyaku

1000=千 sen

1,0000=万 man

10,0000=十万 juuman

100,0000=百万 hyakuman

1000,0000=千万 senman

1,0000,0000=億 oku

1,0000,0000,0000=兆 chou

1,0000,0000,0000,0000=京 kei

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#95

Post by kps »

dragontamer wrote: post #82
unfreezingly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

‘Myriad’, via Greek¹. (Apparently though, ‘myria‐’ was a pre-SI metric prefix for ×10000⏨, so I'm afraid someone will come along and insist on ‘myribi‐’, and I'll have to smack them.)

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000#Name

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#96

Post by rtkwe »

interfixus wrote: post #72
rtkwe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no where near as clear as the chinese version which is literally five tens though. To know fifty is 50 and five tens you have to already know both the meaning of number places and what fifty means, really hard to derive from just the name or seeing 50 written out.

Well, I'm not a native speaker. All I can say is it was crystal clear to me when I began learning English at age ten.

It's not super hidden but you also already understood numbers at that age too presumably so you already had most of the puzzle. As a native speaker I don't think I ever broke the words down like that or had them broken down to me like that (then again this would have been ages ago so maybe it was and I don't remember).

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#97

Post by kps »

XaspR8d wrote: post #40
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.

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.

Most hardware was upper-case-only until the '60s — being descended from upper-case-only accounting cards and/or teleprinters.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#98

Post by dragontamer »

kps wrote: post #95
dragontamer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

‘Myriad’, via Greek¹. (Apparently though, ‘myria‐’ was a pre-SI metric prefix for ×10000⏨, so I'm afraid someone will come along and insist on ‘myribi‐’, and I'll have to smack them.) ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000#Name

Interesting.

Myriad shares similarities to "Million". So maybe Myriad / Biriad / Trilliad / Quadrilliad will scale into the higher orders.

Hmm, maybe I'll make this a thing.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#100

Post by JohnFen »

schoen wrote: post #79
bjackman wrote: post #39

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.

In that case, you could pronounce the :: in IPv6 addresses ("fill with zeroes") as "zillion" if it appears at the end of the address! (I don't know how people pronounce that operator otherwise... I just say "colon colon".)

I have yet to need to recite an IP6 address out loud, so I don't know how I'd say it. I'd probably just recite it digit-by-digit (which is pretty much how I recite all numbers anyway).
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