I wonder if normal users (of PC programs) can read hexadecimal numbers. While computer programmers can read them (or they should do it), I wonder if a boy can understand the meaning of these numbers in an emulator. You know... most of the advanced features (in an emulator) use hex instead of decimal values, like describing a memory range or a memory value.
With the failure of
1960s New Math, I'm pretty sure that only geeks can read numbers in bases other than 10.
Once I thought of writing a hexadecimal tutorial for kids. I'd introduce people who count on their fingers without their thumb, and when they reach eight, they put their fingers back down in order until they get to sixteen. But that'd require having a way to read hexadecimal numbers aloud that's distinct from decimal, so I can form sentences along the lines "What we call fifty, they call thirsy-two: three groups of sixteen and two left over." Here are some of the
concepts I came up with:
- $10 called "steen"
- $20 and $30 called "twensy" and "thirsy"
- $100 called "one page"
The first thing this'd need is plausible names for $A through $F that begin with A through F. The only one from
that Silicon Valley sketch that sounded plausible to me was $F called "fleven", as the digit before the end of the second pass of eight (fleven, $F) parallels the digit before the end of the first pass of eight (seven, $7).
If you see the numbers counting up from 0 to 9, then A to F, and always going from 0F to 10, or 1F to 20, I'm sure people can figure out the basic pattern.
I've been the ignorant boy before in an Apple II that crashed to the Monitor rom, first saw hex there with the numbers counting up. Now if they had any better on-screen explanations at the time, I probably would have picked up 6502 Assembly at age 8...
My guess is that most people who play emulators understand numeric bases. For me, it was taught in 5th grade, and I went to a mundane american public school. Even if they've not heard of hexadecimal, they've certainly heard of binary and roman numerals.
Anyway, hex kinda sucks. Decimal is a lot easier to read and communicate.
I've always had trouble in school with math and numbers tend to jump before my eyes, i've trouble keeping more than a few digits in memory while calculating w/o paper or a calculator, but i could certainly read and understand binaries and hexadecimals by 4th grade. Because of geeky interests, a supportive badass grandmother who did cobol and fortran, and an application called ResEdit.
So it's definitely plausible, but perhaps very circumstantial? Also, you're less likely to see the "guts" of a computer these days, given that a kids' first device is often a walled garden.
My first encounter with hex numbers was probably in the sound test of Sonic the Hedgehog. I may have wondered why there were letters mixed with the numbers, but I didn't give much thought to it and I certainly didn't bother "cracking" the code, I just accepted that the songs were numbered in a weird way.
Even in Sonic 2, where the sound test was used to input cheat codes and knowing the order of the numbers would actually help navigating to find the ones needed for the cheat codes, even then I still didn't care.
So yeah, I don't think the average gamer understands hex or even cares about it. Most people have trouble understanding it's even possible to represent numbers in bases other than 10.
I think most people would be able to learn how to read hexadecimal pretty fast. The concept, after all, is extremely simple.
Being able to think in hexadecimal the way you have been schooled into thinking in base 10 is immensely difficult, though, and is still one of the major obstacles for me when working on a hardware level (ie. assembly).
As tepples touched on, I'm sure a lack of specific names for the larger numbers is probably the main offender, but mostly it's just difficult to teach yourself NOT to try converting everything into base 10 on the fly.
Yes most people will be totally ignorant to hexadecimal numbers.
My first encounter with it was when I tried to learn ROM hacking using the internet. I remember I was dumbfounded of my own ignorance, to think that I never even had heard of something like this before. Hexadecimal notations like dollar signs also confused me to no end (I failed to see why anyone would ever use something like that for anything else than monetary units) until I learned what they meant.
People that only took the mandatory math course in Swedish high schools probably don't even know what a number base is at all, although it's common knowledge that computers uses "ones and zeroes" somehow. And people that studied advanced high school math probably just only briefly used other bases than 10, but not so much focus on hexadecimal as just learning the concept of bases.
Even some math nerd friends I know that also do some high level programming like Javascript, were ignorant to hexadecimal numbers until I taught them about it.
You could have a brief explanation of hexadecimal notation in your help documentation so that people that wonders what they are don't have to hurt their head thinking so hard.
Artist and webdevs use colour codes in the "web format" #FF8040. And they have no idea what it is or what it means. One time there was this artist who could enter some colours with just that # code... he was revered.. Until one day I had to help them tweak some colours, got sick of them wasting my time with them going to PS do to the conversion for them and then sat down and just started to type out the code for colours off the top of my head and was able to add a bit more green etc when requested. I was some insane super god, but being a programmer they already expected it. I then got my white board and explained what hex was, and how it worked and that literally all it was, was the hex of the RGB. Blew there little crayon filled minds.
Go to RHDN and you will see the newbies who want to completely transform a game into something else, but need somebody to explain the complicated stuff like what is F0.
I think we are getting to the point that a lot of "programmers" don't even know what hexcodes are. Like when you show a junior how to look up the crash address using "those pile of random numbers in the blue screen"
but if you really want to sort people out from normal to elite ask them what 053 is
Oziphantom wrote:
but if you really want to sort people out from normal to elite ask them what 053 is
My first thought was the
FamiTracker arpeggio effect code for a 7no3 chord in first inversion. 0 means arpeggio, 5 means perfect fourth above the lowest note, and 3 means minor third above the lowest note. Therefore:
C-4 .. . 035 = C, D#, and F, or Fm7no3/C
C-4 .. . 053 = C, F, and D#, or Fm7no3/C with the upper notes in a different order
But then I've had arpeggios and chords on the brain since a recent effort to add
richer arpeggio notation in the score preprocessor for my music engine. And you probably meant the C and Python notation for octal integer literals, whose traditional leading
0 notation has proven so confusing that ECMAScript 2015 has replaced it with leading
0o.
my brother is a self-taught coder who ended up landing a job as a software engineer at twitter. he doesn't know hex, it's just not that important in the context of modern programming very often - and i'm not sure referring to him as a "programmer" with quotation marks really makes sense, he's certainly way more talented than many people i know who do understand hex. sure it has uses, but it's hardly essential knowledge anymore.
i'm a few years older than him and i can translate from binary to decimal to hex in my head with ease - it had more purpose back then.
so i don't even expect programmers to understand hex these days. the average gamer is surely completely clueless.
I agree. Outside
systems programming, hexadecimal representation isn't very important on a 32-bit or larger system.
pokun wrote:
People that only took the mandatory math course in Swedish high schools probably don't even know what a number base is at all.
I remember that the subject was touched somewhere in fifth or sixth grade (we talked about number bases 2, 8, 10, 16 and 20, used fingers and toes (and spaces between them) and got to try the mayan number system along with the latin), and returned to in eighth grade, with some conversion problems to solve. That was late 90s-millenium shift.
Today in gymnasium (that's 10-12th grade) the basic math courses are subdivided in variants a, b, and c, each representing an alignment: pragmatical/technical, humanities (statistics & analysis), and science, which seems a lot better than what i got in school which was basically a choice between math, math light, and math extra light depending on your program.
oziphantom wrote:
Artist and webdevs use colour codes in the "web format" #FF8040. And they have no idea what it is or what it means.
On the contrary, this is often where they learn what it means. What sort of digital artist doesn't learn this at some point?
Granted, these days you can let both google and bing calculate the desired value for you. But even so, you're likely to intercept something from it, and by just using the tools provided in any picture processor or blog interface will eventually let you learn these things..
tepples wrote:
- $10 called "steen"
- $20 and $30 called "twensy" and "thirsy"
- $100 called "one page"
Why not just keep things simple and keep 0-9 the same? I feel like that'd make it easier for kids to understand.
For me, the biggest issue is that $A0 "Aiddy" and $80 "Eighty" sound pretty much identical, but I guess this could be avoided by calling it "Ashdy" like you suggested. For the rest, names like "Beedy, Seedy, Deedy, Eedy and Effdy" sound simple and intuitive, as they pretty much correspond to the English pronunciation of the high nibble as if it were a letter by itself.
All in all though, I feel like teaching hexadecimal doesn't have much use unless the kids are interested in computers; in which case binary is much simpler, both to explain and visualize. But maybe I'm underestimating how smart kids are.
EDIT: Also, I'm sure this is pretty common too, but in practice anything <$A0 I pronounce as its respective decimal value (i.e 55 would be "fifty-five", 8f would be "eighty-eff"), and anything >= I pronounce as two separate numbers/letters. I.e $AC would be "ayy-see". Not that I say hex values out loud when I code, though.
This is how i do it
A = ɑː (as in bar)
1A = ɑːtiːn (ah-teen)
A0 = ɑːti (ah-ty)
or well, the equivalent in my native language; a, aton, atio (all using the bar pronounciation). That works unless you're from
Småland and/or speak
Småländska.
I think the trouble with thinking/counting in hex without translation is lack of practice and areas of use. If we practiced counting in hexadecimals just like we've practiced counting in decimals in school, it'd come naturally. For most, this sort of investment isn't worth it.
Yeah well it's not a natural part of the language so it can't really be helped. But it is a problem that you can't speak of headeximal numbers very easy because there's no way to pronounce them in a satisfying way, and that also makes it hard to think about at first.
I think since 30 means 3 times 10 (in Swedish it's very clear), then $30 should mean 3 times 16 or it would make little sense. So in Swedish $30 would be tresexton, too long to say! I guess a new short word for sixteen is in order.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
pokun wrote:
People that only took the mandatory math course in Swedish high schools probably don't even know what a number base is at all.
I remember that the subject was touched somewhere in fifth or sixth grade (we talked about number bases 2, 8, 10, 16 and 20, used fingers and toes (and spaces between them) and got to try the mayan number system along with the latin), and returned to in eighth grade, with some conversion problems to solve. That was late 90s-millenium shift.
I don't remember that, I guess it wasn't anything universal in the school curriculum, just something your school did. I do remember number bases and even a bit about computers was taught in senior high school (gymnasium) math course C (I think).
Yeah, it's a bit confusing that the ten-base is baked into the word.
How about replacing "ten" as base with "hex"; as a short form for hexadeca (sixteen)? It'd work in any language not specifically using hex for six.
$30 = thirhex (or threehex, if in an overarticulate language, like trehex in swedish)
$33 = thirhexthree or thirhex-and-three
$A0 = Ahex (ey-hex)
$80 = Eighthex (clear audible difference from Ahex)
teens don't make sense either in a hexadecimal base since they imply a ten. Just better to say:
$13 = Hexthree (one hexadecade is implied)
Quote:
I do remember number bases and even a bit about computers was taught in senior high school (gymnasium) math course C (I think).
I do remember our 8th grade mathbook having a special section for it, with bits of history thrown in - how programmable jacquard looms and punch cards worked, something about alan turing, and how computers went from mechanical to electronic. I never took math course C because i went with the arts programme in gymnasium/senior high school. I think math D and up were only required by those taking science with the CS profile, so i guess that's where the computers + math parts seriously began.
Sogona wrote:
tepples wrote:
- $10 called "steen"
- $20 and $30 called "twensy" and "thirsy"
- $100 called "one page"
Why not just keep things simple and keep 0-9 the same?
Zero through nine are the same, but anything greater than nine needs different names that do not collide with names that already have a decimal meaning. I had planned to contrast, say, thirty (30 decimal) with thirsy (30 hexadecimal), so that "$30 is another name for 48" can be read as "thirsy is another name for forty-eight".
FrankenGraphics wrote:
How about replacing "ten" as base with "hex"; as a short form for hexadeca (sixteen)? It'd work in any language not specifically using hex for six.
That was the idea behind -steen and -sy used as the hex analog of -teen and -ty.
i can only wish i had friends who understood hex well enough that i could even consider this a problem worth thinking about!
Quote:
That was the idea behind -steen and -sy used as the hex analog of -teen and -ty.
Oh, right. I'm only worried it's a little too similar, easy to mishear, or be interpreted as a slip on the keyboard for a soon-to-be-intitiate.
For example, "eightsy" and "asy" are/look/sound very close, as are "eightsy" and "eighty" - especially in crossnational conversations where accents come into play.
On the other hand, it won't have the incompatibility problem with greek (using hex as short form for hexadeca, even though that's normal in computer science speak).
Edit:
"Hex" would be easy to expand to larger numbers in a self-explanatory fashion.
$100 = Hexdred
$1000 = Hexand
So a larger number like $723A would be "seven-hexand two-hexdred and thir-hex ey". A little smurfy, but at least there won't any mistakes it's hexadecimal base.
I just spell out the digits. Like reading out "one hundred" as "one zero zero", I read out numbers like $C000 and $2007 as "hex see zero zero zero" and "hex two zero zero seven".
I speak computer languages better than English anyway so why try to English-ize them?
Yeah that's the only way to do it at the moment. But it takes a lot of space in my short-term memory so I can't keep track on many digits at the same time that way. I often cheat and read $50 as fifty (or actually the Swedish counterpart) and the like, and it works as long as there is no letters other than in the ones digit.
tepples wrote:
FrankenGraphics wrote:
How about replacing "ten" as base with "hex"; as a short form for hexadeca (sixteen)? It'd work in any language not specifically using hex for six.
That was the idea behind -steen and -sy used as the hex analog of -teen and -ty.
Oh I misread -sy as -ty. So -sy is times 16, now it makes sense. I'd thought maybe it would be better to do away with the -teen suffix to keep things consistent. $10 would be onesy or something. But on the other hand I guess you use -steen for all numbers between $10 and $1F so it is quite consistent already (unlike decimal numbers that use -teen for 13 to 19 only).
OK let's invent the Swedish pronunciation then (just for fun).
I'll steal the idea with -sy and call "times 16" as "se" (short for sexton). The "e" is a short vowel.
$0 to $9 are same as in decimal
$A to $F are same as in alphabet
$10 is "ense" (en * 16) (or ettse, either is fine)
$20 is "tvåse" (to keep things consistent, screw Swedish "tjugo")
$40 is "fyrse" (screw the pronunciation of "fyrtio" as well)
$60 is "sexse" (OK this one is hard to pronounce, maybe "se" wasn't such a good idea after all)
$80 is "åttse" (two-syllable numbers are reduced to one syllable)
$90 is "nise" (even "nio" is reduced to a single syllable)
$A0 is "ase" (letters doesn't seem to be a problem)
$B0 is "bese"
$E0 is "ese" (note that the first "e" is a long vowel like the letter E is pronounced)
etc
"Times 256" is "te" (again short vowel) short for "tvåhundrafemtiosex":
$100 is "ente" (or "ette", tripple consonant not allowed in Swedish)
$800 is "åtte"
$B00 is "bete"
etc
"Times 4096" is "fe" short for "fyratusennittiosex"
$1000 is "enfe" (or "ettfe")
etc
Example: $74E2 is read as "sjufefyrteesetvå".
Maybe I should've posted it in the Swedish section, not sure how many people look there though. Thoughts?
I'm sorry, i don't think that's very human oriented (basing the vowels for $100 and $1000 on half acronyms for 256, 4096).
It also becomes quite the tounge twister since fe, te, se are similar and intermix sonically with (swedish) words for the numerals, while not resembling their decimal-base equivalents; making them harder to memorize and recall.
I think mimicking the oral formula of decimal-based counting while still sounding distinct enough not to be mistaken should be the maxim.
I agree with you. I used "se" because it's short, easy to say, inspired by Tepple's -sy suffix and because it still has some relation to 16 which it is based on. But the others was mainly made to be similar to "se" in order to make a consistent pattern. We could use another vowel than "e" that is not A or E. I thought of "o" first: "so", "to", "fo" etc. And maybe change the consonants as well to avoid the tripple consonant sound in sexse. Alternatively they all use different vowel and consonant to make them more distinct from each other. Like so for 16, te for 256, fu for 4096 etc.
I'm not sure what you mean they can be made to sound like their decimal equalents though? The decimal equalents are 16, 256, 4096 etc which only have very long compound words in decimal. I see no choice but to make up new short words for them. But yeah some kind of logical system to make them easier to remember would be nice.
Oh, i wasn't very clear there... It's not a mathematical equivalent, but a linguistic. I can't speak for other languages due to lack of experience, but many european languages share the same root for powers of [base].
Germanic languages:
Hundert, Tausand.
Hundred, Thousand.
Hundra, tusen.
The word for hundred is another in finnish (and presumably other finnic languages):
Sata, Tuhat
Sata is also shared with the slavic group, like in polish:
Sto, Tysiąc (c is pronounced ts)
So, all in all, these words represent different powers without litteraly spelling out ten times ten, or ten times ten times ten, specifically. Or if they did, it's very much lost in history.
That, unlike ten (-teen, -ty) makes them perfect for fusion with other bases than ten. That was my basis for the proposal hexdred, hexand (which can be translated to just about any of these groups at least without hassle). Hex is short for hexadecade, the suffix lets you know what power of the hexadecade.
Rephrased: Hexdred is short form for hexadecade-dred: 16x16. -dred is assumed to mean "times [base]" no matter what the base is.
Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't take more time (at least in germanic languages) to say hexdred - or shorter. Two hundred has the same speaking rythm as Two hexdred. Compare with Två hexdra. Zwei hexert. It's the same, which makes it easy and natural to use.
Some other languages are a little worse off, rythm-wise: Hexsto (or perhaps heksto since x is not natively used in polish and represents a "cha" sound in other related languages, including russian), hexata. Native speakers are free to object my attempts to synthesize new words.
Generally, i believe it's better to add a syllable than subtract one to the power denominator, because many languages mostly have one-syllable words for their numerals and two-syllable words for their denominators, or a syllable with a more or less articulate difton (nine, neun, nio). So that's good for distinguishing power denominators fron numerals, but i don't know how that would sound in a two-or-more-syllable numeral system, like finnish where one is yksi and seven is seitsemän, for example.
I meant linguistic too, but I see that you were talking about the use of power of the base in these languages.
I'm not sure how this would work in Japanese though. Hekusuhyaku? Hekkyaku? It would be hard to split "hyaku" (100) to use as a suffix for "hex-", as it is really already a single morpheme, and 1000 is even worse. Or Greek for that matter, I don't like that hex sounds like 6 rather than 16. Inventing another word without conflicts that replaces "hex" would solve that last problem though. And it wouldn't be hard to memorize because in your system you use it all the time. How about something like "heka"? It ends in a vowel so it's easy to combine with the numeral morphemes.
Quote:
Generally, i believe it's better to add a syllable than subtract one to the power denominator, because many languages mostly have one-syllable words for their numerals and two-syllable words for their denominators, or a syllable with a more or less articulate difton (nine, neun, nio). So that's good for distinguishing power denominators fron numerals, but i don't know how that would sound in a two-or-more-syllable numeral system, like finnish where one is yksi and seven is seitsemän, for example.
Maybe so, though the only language I know that strictly has single-syllable numerals (for single digit numbers) is Chinese. I'd be surprised if having triple-syllable numerals would be unique to Finnish anyway.
For the higher powers of sixteen, it might be helpful to figure out where various languages' words for hundred and thousand came from in the first place in order to see where analogies can be drawn.
- Proto-Indo-European word for hundred was *kmtóm, from which Latin centum and Welsh kant is clearly descended. PIE had two k sounds, one in front that became s in Slavic and Indic, and another in back, similar to Arabic q, that remained k everywhere. PIE k became Germanic h, leading to the first syllable of "hundred". Based on similarity to PIE *dékmt meaning "ten", it may have arisen from idiomatic use of "the tenth [something]", likely "the tenth group of ten".
- Latin mille and Greek χίλια (earlier χίλιοι) come from a Proto-Indo-European phrase meaning "a full hand"; thousand is from a different PIE word.
I was planning to use "one page" for $100 (sixteen sixteens), perhaps explained in-universe as the number of words that can fit on a handwritten sheet of paper.
tepples wrote:
I was planning to use "one page" for $100 (sixteen sixteens), perhaps explained in-universe as the number of words that can fit on a handwritten sheet of paper.
8086 (real mode) idiom uses "one paragraph" for $10 and "one page" for $100.
^^^Neat! Any further, like $1000?
tepples wrote:
I keep forgetting and losing both of these links. Trying to find them actually turns up
a few other people trying to neologize over this exact problem, too.
That last link produces that Nystrom came up with a system for working in hexadecimal, the
Tonal System, 150 years ago. It doesn't look too compatible with the hexadecimal notation we use today, though, what wth 9 being reassigned…
Neat indeed. Short answer at the moment but that could definitely work, especially as it has some prior use and is clear. In speech and thought "paragraph" needs to be cropped, though, to be practical. Par or para perhaps. I'm uncertain if page needs a similar treatment. It could be -pa, to make it fluid (pronounced pay), but would clash with the next numeral if it is A. On the other hand, language often inserts a consonant sound precisely for that reason so it could as well be pa-b, page-a, and both would be easily recognizable as the same power.
Some examples to help discern what's best:
$43B = fourpage thirpara-b - /fɔː(r)peɪdʒ θɜːrˈpærə beː/
or
= four-pa thirpar b - /fɔː(r)pei θɜːrpær beː/
or a combo/compromise.
1:s can still be implied:
$10 = par
$20 = twenpar/twopar
$100 = page
$200 = twopage
teens are made redundant:
$13 = parthree / parathree
I like it, I prefer para the most. -Pa is confusing that it is pronounced like pay but spelled totally differently.
The only worry I have about page is that it's often used as a memory chunk (I read somewhere it's the smallest mappable memory chunk in a memory space?) and if it's system specific and not always $100 byte it could conflict with that.
The culture that our guide introduces would have been using "page" to mean $100 since before electronic computers were invented. Words for large numbers and writing emerged at much the same time and for much the same reason, as a way of describing ownership of livestock or other private property.
Don't believe me? Fill a ruled sheet of paper with your handwriting. Count the words.
I was thinking the power above page would be bank, but that's a bit misleading given banks can be of pretty much any size.
The words on a page experiment should be conducted in english, right? It might not work in other (european at least) languages since english has a very high number of one-syllable words; cleft, deft, pull, shove, love*. In swedish, that would be klyfta, skicklig, dra (or draga if you're reading a text from the 40s), knuffa, kärlek.
*The success of english pop music is sometimes attributed to british/american imperialism, but i find this reason just as contributing if not more. It's relatively easy to make a memorable rhyme or two within the constraints of a bar. Compare with the parallel genre schlager (meaning something that hits), which is mostly a non-english european affair; popular in languages which generally take a bit more time to express about the same thing. I often find that classical schlagers often take twice the score length to express a lyrical point.
Edit: Though of course, this particular use of "page" was likely defined by someone english speaking.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
The words on a page experiment should be conducted in english, right? It might not work in other (european at least) languages since english has a very high number of one-syllable words; cleft, deft, pull, shove, love*. In swedish, that would be klyfta, skicklig, dra (or draga if you're reading a text from the 40s), knuffa, kärlek.
Yeah and it would probably wouldn't work in Chinese either, but for the opposite reason considering the compactness of written Chinese (and also Japanese to a lesser degree). Classic Chinese might be even worse with mostly only monosyllable words often written with one character per word. And wasn't it the Chinese that developed bamboo rolls, paper and some of the more sophisticated pens?
Here's a few suggestions to powers greater than page, besides bank:
chapter, block, book. I think i prefer block.
$C03F = Ceeblock thirpar eff.
$8456 = Eightblock fourpage fifpar six
I don't think there's a need describing a number higher than $FFFF orally/cognitive. Hex colour codes are for example supossed to be read rr gg bb, not rrggbb.
You could also split addresses this way. Eightpar four, fifpar six.
Systems with an address range larger than $FFFFFF might be read similar to how you would use ten thousand.
I like book and block, and they'd work well in Swedish too (bok and block). Par may not work so well because it sounds like the Swedish word for pair/couple, meaning 2. And page would be sida? Hmmm...
The only possible problem with block I see, is that block (of code) is a common term in programming it could conflict with.
Yeah more than four digits and the numbers are probably too large to talk about anyway so it would be easier to divide them in two or four digits in that case. Like $FFFFFF could be read as "effblockeffpageeffpareff and effpareff". And in for example SNES programming the term bank is already used naturally here.
Re: swedish translation (quotation so others may skip):
Quote:
I thought par was easily discernable. Built from paragraf, pronunciation would be /par/. Par, as in pair, is /pɑːr/ (notice difference in both timbre and length: a vs ɑ, and a/ɑ vs a/ɑː). If that's not enough, para would work i suppose. But then we need to be sure to pronounce $xA as para-A with a punch to the a (/'ɑː/ rather than /ɑː/). Or how a teenager might explosively say "öh!" when they want to have something passed at dinner
Sida (page) might not be that much of a problem. Remember we have the prefix form sido- which would sound natural.
So:
$100 = (en) sida
$101 ... $1FF = sidoett ... sidoeffparaeff.
It becomes tricker when pages are more than one, though - should it be:
$2FF = tvåsido effparaeff
or
tvåsidor effparaeff?
I suspect that we won't be able to come up with a system that'll be universally suitable for all languages. There would need to be localizations. But if the process is relatively painless for some of
the largest languages by number of native speakers, it's good. Just being able to think and clearly communicate hex numerals in english is pretty good, too.
If we *really* wanted to extend beyond $1000 using powers with dedicated names, we could extend the analogy of paragraphs, pages and blocks/books with suite, row, shelf, corridor, and floor
Not that anyone would use it or find it practical.
Haha yeah I agree.
Swedish discussion:
Quote:
No matter the origin if I see par I would pronounce it with the long vowel. I didn't think -para A would be a problem. The two A-sounds could just meld and become a long A-sound. Or maybe that is a problem with Swedish vowel quantity rules (short vowel = long consonant, short consonant = long vowel).
OK sida is good.
Regarding $2FF, numerals are never divided in separate words in Swedish (both in written and spoken language), and there is no limit to the length of a word in Swedish either. It will have to be merged like this:
$2FF = tvåsidoeffparaeff
But what about plural form if it's just $200?
$200 = tvåsida, tvåsidor or even tvåsido?