Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 124 posts

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#101

Post by bscphil »

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.

I agree with you, sort of, in that if we're inventing a new system we may as well make it more intuitive for base 0x10 numbers while we're at it. At the very least we need something like the thousands separator, otherwise something like 0x10000000 becomes very difficult to say. Perhaps just use "word" as the suffix for (2^4)^4 sized groups. [1] And then "biword", "triword", "quadword", etc. So 0x10000000 would become "one aught aught aught word".

But then you start to see the advantage of named systems, because you end up saying "aught" or "zero" a lot to distinguish "0xA" from "0xA0" within words. "A salary of one aught aught word" doesn't seem as easy to me as "a salary of one hundred thousand". So perhaps something ought to be done about 0x10 and 0x100, even if we only use them in situations that can be abbreviated like that. Maybe 0x10 is "hex", so "base 0x10" becomes literally read as "base hex".

[1] Of course this fixes a meaning for how many bytes are in a word, which a lot of people aren't going to be happy with. ;-)

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#102

Post by Mountain_Skies »

Zenst wrote: post #65
teddyh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fact which may be related is that Unicode contains a character which is in effect a lengthened tilde character, called U+2053 SWUNG DASH: ⁓ Therefore, might your “swan hyphen” be a corruption of an original term “swung hyphen”?

Interesting, it may well have some bearing upon the UNICODE naming which came about in 1991, which would be around the time that it's usage for "~" seemed to wane out of use. "#" was another one with many names that have consolidated over time, been decades since heard anybody refer to it as a checkerboard, which was never as elegant and can see why "hash" became the norm.

Bell Telephone videos around the time touch tone dialing was introduced called it the tictactoe symbol. Seemed like a rather informal name from such a formal organization but I guess they wanted something that all of the public would know.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#103

Post by roywiggins »

dragontamer wrote: post #98
kps wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘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.

Not to be confused with the long-scale numbers: milliard/billiard/trilliard

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#104

Post by kmill »

Zenst wrote: post #26

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.

That's a twiddle (I think I was influenced by Intercal).

Sometimes single quotes to me are "ticks," with the grave accent being a "back-tick."

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#105

Post by gowld »

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

Following the French style:

10 is sixteen.

11 is sixteen one

A is not ten in hexadecimal.

"ten" always means 10 in any base. the number after "nine" is "deci".

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#106

Post by DoreenMichele »

Signez wrote: post #27
sjrd wrote: post #23

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…

Let's note that this fall apart in Metropolitan French, where we don't say neither « septante » for 70, nor « nonante » for 90 (and even less « huitante » for 80), but « soixante-dix » for 70, « quatre-vingt » for 80 and « quatre-vingt-dix » for 90. It's quite a shame, because that solution for reading hexadecimal numbers out loud is quite elegant :)

For the folks who know zero French:

« soixante-dix » for 70 = sixty-ten

« quatre-vingt » for 80 = four-twenty

« quatre-vingt-dix » for 90 = four-twenty-ten

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#107

Post by mjevans »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #91
apocolyps6 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I also prefer just reading off the short version; either in sets of (up to) 4 or 2, depending on the application.

For a mac address I'd not summarize and just read it off in 6 pairs.

For the example representation address on the wikipedia page... 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address )

Two Zero Zero One Colon Delta Bravo Eight Colon Eight Five Alpha Three Colon (pause) Colon Eight Alpha Two Echo Colon Three Seven Zero Colon Seven Three Three Four.

The part in the middle might need a better way of announcing, but given the double digits in other parts of the address it seems more natural to read it as a string of characters than to alter it.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#108

Post by Guillaume86 »

Tharkun wrote: post #32
Signez wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's note that this fall apart in Metropolitan French, where we don't say neither « septante » for 70, nor « nonante » for 90 (and even less « huitante » for 80), but « soixante-dix » for 70, « quatre-vingt » for 80 and « quatre-vingt-dix » for 90. It's quite a shame, because that solution for reading hexadecimal numbers out loud is quite elegant :)

Belgian French uses septante/nonante. Huitante would be a great addition.

In the context of hex numbers "quatre-vingt" isn't a problem tho, no ambiguity.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#109

Post by reaperducer »

Zenst wrote: post #65
teddyh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fact which may be related is that Unicode contains a character which is in effect a lengthened tilde character, called U+2053 SWUNG DASH: ⁓ Therefore, might your “swan hyphen” be a corruption of an original term “swung hyphen”?

Interesting, it may well have some bearing upon the UNICODE naming which came about in 1991, which would be around the time that it's usage for "~" seemed to wane out of use. "#" was another one with many names that have consolidated over time, been decades since heard anybody refer to it as a checkerboard, which was never as elegant and can see why "hash" became the norm.

Unless it's on twitter, it's still either a "pound" or "octothorp" to me, depending on context. Hash is a breakfast food.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#110

Post by ummonk »

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.

So like 4 zillion will be more than 5 zillion (assuming talking about unsigned 32 bit)?
Post reply on HN