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We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

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Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#301

Post by p_l »

leni536 wrote: post #263
vincent-manis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the PDP-10 didn't have any byte size at all, it was a word-addressed machine. (An early attempt to implement C on this machine came a cropper because of this.) It did have a Load Byte and a Store Byte instruction, which allowed you to select the byte size. Common formats were Sixbit (self-explanatory), ASCII (5 7-bit bytes and an unused bit), and (more rarely, I think), 9-bit bytes. My first machines were t…

> It did have a Load Byte and a Store Byte instruction, which allowed you to select the byte size. Were these instructions atomic regarding interrupts? If not, then these look like shorthands for masking/shifting bit-fields out of words, leaving the word as the smallest atomically addressable unit.

They are atomic, indeed. The underlying implementation might have used masking and shifting, especially in bit-slice implementations like KS-10, but as far as operation of the computer was concerned they were atomic.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#302

Post by zveyaeyv3sfye »

dmitrygr wrote: post #217
Dylan16807 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm not blaming the consumer. If you want to come into a topic and say the problem is that IPv6 did too much, you can't fall back on "it doesn't matter who's at fault". Yes it does matter, that's what this thread is about , that and looking at how technological changes would have affected deployment.

It is forever tainted and I will put down money on a bet that when IPv4 is replaced (in the 2040s), it will be by something that will not be IPv6.

My main man, It is already IPv6 !

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#303

Post by meepmorp »

galangalalgol wrote: post #298
fc417fc802 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think 12/48/96 would be more practical than the current 8/32/64. 32 bits is almost trivially easy to overflow whereas 48 bits is almost always enough when working with integers. And 64 bits is often insufficient or at least uncomfortably tight when packing bits together. Whereas by the time you've blown past 96 you should really just bust out the arrays and eat any overhead. Similarly I feel that 24 bits…

The fixed point TI dsp chips always had a long int that was 48. Intel had 84 bit floating point registers before simd registers took over. And the pdp-11... Powers of two aren't as ubiquitous as it seems. If anything, the hardware uses whatever sizes it wants and that gets abstracted from the rest of the world by compilers and libraries.

The pdp-11 was 16-bit.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#305

Post by jodrellblank »

vbezhenar wrote: post #294
willis936 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato argued that 7! was the ideal number of citizens in a city because it was a highly factorable number. Being able to cut numbers up is an time-tested favorite. That's why there are 360 degrees.

I've always held opinion that ideal base for our day life computation is 12. It's close enough to 10, so most things would work just as well (like you just need to remember 2 more digits), but it's actually divisible by 3, 4, 6 which is a lot more useful than 5, compared to 10-base.

> "(like you just need to remember 2 more digits)"

"The standard among mathematicians for writing larger bases is to extend the Arabic numerals using the Latin alphabet, so ten is written with the letter A and eleven is written with the letter B. But actually doing it that way makes ten and eleven look like they're too separate from the rest of the digits so you can use an inverted two for ten and an inverted three for eleven. But those don't display in most fonts so you can approximate them with the letters T and E which also happen to be the first letters of the English words ten and eleven. But actually as long as we're okay for using the Latin alphabet characters for these digits then we might as well use X for ten like in Roman numerals. But actually now we're back to having them look too different from the other ten digits so how about instead we use the Greek letters Chi and Epsilon but actually if we're using Greek letters then there's no association between the X looking letter and the number ten, so maybe you can write ten with the Greek letter delta instead.

And all you really need to learn is those 'two new digits' and you're ready to use dozenal."

- Jan Misali in his comedy video on why base 6 is a better way to count than base 12 or base 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qID2B4MK7Y0 (which is a pisstake and ends up making the point that Base 10 isn't so bad).

("in dozenal, a seventh is written as 0.186X35 recurring because it's equal to one gross eight dozen ten great gross ten gross three dozen five eleven gross eleven dozen eleven great gross eleven dozen eleventh's").

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#306

Post by balamatom »

amelius wrote: post #292
almost wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

360 degrees in a circle predates Plato by quite a lot (2000 years I think!). It comes from the Summarians more than 4000 years ago. They used a method of counting on fingers that goes up to 12 on one hand and 60 using both hands, so their numbering system was based on 60. 360 is 6 * 60 and also roughly how many days in a year. Later societies inherited that from them along with 60 minutes in and hour.

But why wasn't the handcounting inherited too? It sounds useful to be able to count up until 60 on two hands.

Probably because it was too contrived. I mean, if you can count up to 12 on one, why can't you do up to 144 on both?

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#307

Post by e-topy »

vbezhenar wrote: post #294
willis936 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato argued that 7! was the ideal number of citizens in a city because it was a highly factorable number. Being able to cut numbers up is an time-tested favorite. That's why there are 360 degrees.

I've always held opinion that ideal base for our day life computation is 12. It's close enough to 10, so most things would work just as well (like you just need to remember 2 more digits), but it's actually divisible by 3, 4, 6 which is a lot more useful than 5, compared to 10-base.

Yeah, metric is cool and all, you can divide by ten and multiply by ten. But even better would be a hexadecimal system so that you could halve, third and quarter it. Plus it's n^2 so it's a perfect square \s

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#308

Post by amelius »

balamatom wrote: post #306
amelius wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why wasn't the handcounting inherited too? It sounds useful to be able to count up until 60 on two hands.

Probably because it was too contrived. I mean, if you can count up to 12 on one, why can't you do up to 144 on both?

Could have something to do with right-handedness.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#309

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

bregma wrote: post #279
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

360 is base 60. (6*60) Like minutes and seconds. The 12 hours in a day and the 12 months are also 60 / 5. This all connects to ancient Mesopotamia somehow.

> 12 hours in a day I guess, for a sufficiently large value of 12.

Yes, the original day was 12 hours. (Hence the legacy of "AM" and "PM" that some countries still use.)

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#310

Post by nyeah »

willis936 wrote: post #98
duskwuff wrote: post #17

Non-power-of-2 sizes are awkward from a hardware perspective. A lot of designs for e.g. optimized multipliers depend on the operands being divisible into halves; that doesn't work with units of 9 bits. It's also nice to be able to describe a bit position using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 0-7 in 3 bits, 0-31 in 5 bits, 0-63 in 6 bits), e.g. to represent a number of bitwise shift operations, or to select a bit from a…

Plato argued that 7! was the ideal number of citizens in a city because it was a highly factorable number. Being able to cut numbers up is an time-tested favorite. That's why there are 360 degrees.

Plato is being annoying, and not for the first time. Sure, 7! has a lot of factors. But one person dies and you've got 5039. That's prime[1], so I guess your society breaks down? [1] https://prime-numbers.fandom.com/wiki/5,039#:~:text=5%2C039%...
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