Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968) • Hacker News Board

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#121

Post by ummonk » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #110

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)?

Oh I guess you'd say 05 zillion ("oh-five zillion").

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#122

Post by reaperducer » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #120

reaperducer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: . Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERC…

I learned # from my father, who introduced me to electronics as a lad by bringing a broken Telex machine home from work. He called it "pound," and it stuck with me.

Also, I remember * being "splat" back in my PR1MOS and Vax days.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#123

Post by taejo » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

aloisdg wrote: post #36

iNate2000 wrote: post #17

Didn't Malcolm Gladwell talk about how the Chinese names for numbers were were closer to their place values and therefore less confusing for calculations? e.g. "50" is "five-tens" instead of "fifty"

Esperanto uses a similar system: 5 is kvin and 10 is dek so 50 is kvindek . If you know how to count to 10, you know how to count to 99. 100 is cent , so 500 is kvincent . 505 is kvincent kvin and 555 is kvincent kvindek kvin . Alright, now you know how to count to 999. A "number to Esperanto" is a great exercise to code and Esperanto is a lovely language to learn. Try it!

There was a programme where primary-school kids were taught Esperanto as their first foreign language for a year, before switching to French for N years. Not only did those in the programme speak better French at the end than those who had learnt French for the whole N+1 years (which was the hypothesis being tested) but it was also found that many of the kids translated arithmetic problems into Esperanto before solving them and translating the answers back into English.

Re: Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)

#124

Post by lucideer » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

vermilingua wrote: post #64

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.

Pronounce 11,78D vs B78D.

Sixteen-one thousand, seven hundred and eighty fourteen

As, from the original french comment:

1A = dix / ten

10 = seize / sixteen

11 = seize-et-un / sixteen-one

Others have suggested 10 = onety instead of sixteen. This would be more consistent, but less idiomatic (onety is not a number in English, and hex is base sixteen).