Eleventy What? 157
TheFr00n asks: "I recently managed to teach my ten year old son the hexadecimal number system, but he shot me back a question that has me stumped. How does one pronounce hex, after the first iteration? In decimal, we have nice words like 'fifty' and 'sixteen'. Is there an official way of pronouncing a hexadecimal number like CF9? 'See hundred and effty-nine'? (which is totally wrong anyway because a hundred is 64 in hexidecimal) Any thoughts?"
Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps, (Score:3, Insightful)
we'd have some slick as chit way to pronounce them.
Necessity is the MUTHA of invention. Most people go
around talking in base ten. Most people have no
need at all for anything but base ten. Go figure
it's what we have words for.
Err, it's just the same as any other number system (Score:3, Insightful)
The number we have given the name two and is written as "2" in decimal, in binary is written 10, but it's still called two, just the notation changed. In hexadecimal, the number we call sixteen is written 10, but it's still called sixteen.
Of course if you want say a number in a specific notation you'll need to not only spell it out but also state the system so as to avoid ambiguity ("the number `one-zero' in binary notation") as using the number's name implies the use of the decimal notation.
If you ask somebody to write down some numbers, and you read them out as "one, two, three, four", the subject should be perfectly able to use the binary notational system to write them down as "01, 10, 11, 100", they've recorded the numbers you spake correctly.
I have the solution! (Score:3, Insightful)
I was really inspired by this question. It's a wonderful mix of mathematics and linguistics. Because a quick post to Slashdot couldn't cover it in enough detail, I wrote up some thoughts I had on the subject, which you can find here [michael-forman.com]. Also included is information on how Americans and Europeans differ in their transliteration of base-ten numbers.
Here's an excerpt:
How does one transliterate numbers of arbitrary bases? For example the number "562" is transliterated as "five hundred and sixty two" but how would one transliterate the hex number "0xDEADBEEF"? The text below attempts to answer that question using two methods. The first is a rigorous and technically accurate method but is difficult to use. The second is technically less rigorous but is simple to use
Michael.
Re:Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
Please be precise enough to use "zero" when pronouncing "0".
"Decimal: 4729 - Four thousand seven hundred and twenty nine"
There is no "and" in "4729".