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Eleventy What?

Posted by Cliff on from the pronouncing-hexidecimal dept.

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?"

2 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Perhaps, by Sevn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If there was an actual need to speak these numbers,
    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.

    --
    For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
  2. I have the solution! by Michael.Forman · · 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. 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.

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