Eleventy What?

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?"

Comments

Color

[David_Bloom]

Well, if it represented a color (#c0f090), I'd call it light green.

In all non-decimal systems..

[denubis]

This is, unfortunatly, a point that has been drilled into me by my Discrete Math profs.

All non decimal systems pronounce the digits individally.

E.g. 10 in base 2 is not "ten" but "one zero"
And 734 in octal is "seven, three, four. Not seven thirty four, or variations on that theme.

Hope this helps.

Donald Knuth Has The Answer

[Sunlighter]

In section 4.1 of The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth describes:

...a prominent Swedish-American civil engineer named John W. Nystrom [who] decided to... [devise] a complete system of numeration, weights, and measures based on radix-16 arithmetic. He wrote, "I am not afraid, or do not hesitate, to advocate a binary system of arithmetic and metrology. I know I have nature on my side; if I do not succeed to impress upon you its utility and great importance to mankind, it will reflect that much less credit on our generation, upon our scientific men and philosophers." Nystrom devised special means for pronouncing hexadecimal numbers; for example, [0xC0160] was to be read "vybong, bysanton." His entire system was called the Tonal System, and it is described in J. Franklin Inst. 46 (1863), 263-275, 337,348, 402-407.

Maybe you should get that issue of that journal and give it a try.