🚀 go-pugleaf

My, my, my, I do seem to have stirred up the natives of this quaint
newsgroup with My Little Posting [this is a new toy, closely related
to My Little Pony] about how easy it is to do arithmetic in hex.  I
got several pieces of mail and a couple of postings.  To wit:

In article <3144@blake.acs.washington.edu>,
 mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin) writes:

>Yay-ah, buckie boy, ah know what ol' hex is.  Ahm jest a young'un in
>computing 'cuz ah've only done it fer 18 years...

Which is about the same length of time I've been doing it, BTW.

>It is much more difficult to do arithmetic in hex.  You have to remember
>glyphs that are not used in the human (decimal) counting system (A through
>F), their bit patterns, and their arithmetic rules.  I can probably tell
>you that the bit pattern 111010011110111001100010110000001101 is
>723671426015 octal much faster than you can tell me it is E9EE62C0D hex.

Perhaps, but I've only used hex in any significant way since I got to
this job (less than six months ago), though I used to see it once in
a while on IBM mainframes.  In any case, I am taking issue with
statements like hex is "much" harder to do arithmetic in.  In a year
or so, I expect to be able to work in hex about as fast as I could work
in octal before.  In any case, there are other considerations, e.g.
that octal is apt to be a poor choice on a 16-bit machine.

(The above example is a 36-bitter, and you just don't see them that much
 any more.  I miss them, though.  It's a pain to read 36 bits regardless.)

>Fortunately, along with the creeping imposition of hexadecimal on all
>modern computers have come tools such that it's virtually never
>necessary to do any *human work* in hex.

Oh, I don't know.  We OS hackers still do it on occasion.  But we also
have xcalc, etc, to lighten the load.  I certainly don't miss toggling
programs in by hand.  Computers are for doing the grunt work, however
much of a feeling of smug satisfaction we may get from knowing we
could do it ourselves if we had to.

In closing, let me note that I went back and reparsed the offending
sentences from the original posting, and I now see the ambiguity more
clearly.  But let's just agree to disagree.

  -- David Wright, Stellar Computer Inc
     wright@stellar.stellar.com  or  uunet!stellar!wright

 "But where indeed is the ambiguity -- over there, in a box."

                       -- Monty Python