On 13 October 2016 at 12:05, Cory Benfield
integer & 0x00FFFFFF # Hex integer & 16777215 # Decimal integer & 0o77777777 # Octal integer & 0b111111111111111111111111 # Binary
The octal representation is infuriating because one octal digit refers to *three* bits
Correct, makes it not so nice looking and 8-bit-paradigm friendly. Does not make it however bad option in general and according to my personal suppositions and works on glyph development the optimal set is exactly of 8 glyphs.
Decimal is no clearer.
In same alignment problematic context, yes, correct.
Binary notation seems like the solution, ...
Agree with you, see my last reply to Greg for more thoughts on bitstrings and quoternary approach.
IIRC there’s some new syntax coming for binary literals that would let us represent them as 0b1111_1111_1111_1111
Very good. Healthy attitude :)
less dense and loses clarity for many kinds of unusual bit patterns.
Not very clear for me what is exactly there with patterns.
Additionally, as the number of bits increases life gets really hard: masking out certain bits of a 64-bit number requires
Self the editing of such a BITmask in hex notation makes life hard. Editing it in binary notation makes life easier.
a literal that’s at least 66 characters long,
Length is a feature of binary, though it is not major issue, see my ideas on it in reply to Greg
Hexadecimal has the clear advantage that each character wholly represents 4 bits,
This advantage is brevity, but one need slightly less brevity to make it more readable. So what do you think about base 4 ?
This is a very long argument to suggest that your argument against hexadecimal literals (namely, that they use 16 glyphs as opposed to the 10 glyphs used in decimal) is an argument that is too simple to be correct.
I didn't understood this sorry :))) Youre welcome to ask more if youre intersted in this.
Different collections of glyphs are clearer in different contexts. How much different collections and how much different contexts?
while the english language requires 26 glyphs plus punctuation.
Does not *require*, but of course 8 glyphs would not suffice to effectively read the language, so one finds a way to extend the glyph set. Roughly speaking 20 letters is enough, but this is not exact science. And it is quite hard science.
But I don’t think you’re seriously proposing we should swap from writing English using the larger glyph set to writing it in decimal representation of ASCII bytes.
I didn't understand this sentence :) In general I think we agree on many points, thank you for the input! Cheers, Mikhail