No prob. That's why computers use it because it's easy to do.

Good idea will check it out.

Start from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_notation .


Modern world appears to be completely dumbed down - we were taught the above at school, before age of 17.

No.

Computers don't care - they are not humans.

This is severely OT, but the description of number systems reminded me of former employer I worked for. The owner of that company was a genius, but also of a bit a nerd as happens so often with smart people. Our workstations were W 3.11, but for the servers etc he insisted on Solaris. This was 1992, so Linux was not really widespread.

He insisted on a standard file name convention, wich was FILENAME.YMD. 8.3 filenames only, remember? So to write YMD, we used that last digit of the year, the month in base-12, and the day in base-31. Base-31 is not difficult, just continue to use alphanumerics after F... After some practicing most of us could remember the ordinals of the characters by heart. I have been using this base-31 file extensions for many years after that, until the 8.3 filenames completely disappeared.

jlinkels

It is amazing how many programmers still use this incredibly short-sighted practice. Not just single digit years, 2 digit years are nearly as bad. In the next 40 years we are going to be facing a shitstorm of "if (2digityear < 50) then 4digityear=2digityear+2000 else 4digityear=2digityear+1900" breakdowns across the board. Even now, when file name and memory space restrictions are almost non-existent, I still see programmers using this practice all over the place.

It gets me all worked up...sorry about the tangent.

I think you are right about the laziness/shortsightedness of certain programmers, but with 8.3 filenames there was little other choice. Maybe 8.3 was not such a good idea.

jlinkels

I think that should be 1 + 1 = 0 carry 1.

My inner pedant emerges again. Someone should have noticed that after the old "10 people...." thing came up.

While tempting to bash Microsoft for the whole 8.3 filename thing, I'm fairly sure it was a deliberate choice to be compatible with CP/M.

--- rod.