4 ms·

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.

• JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  Because there is a shed that needs to be biked.
• gnulinux 7y ago
  Simply because people love bikeshedding naming conventions. At this point, naming is just an engineering meme.
• combatentropy 7y ago
  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?"
• Izkata 7y ago
  Isn't "fif-ty-six" three syllables?
• bscphil 7y ago
  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. ;-)