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Every base is base 10 (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (22 children)

Huh, that's a good point. A better universal naming system would be something like "Base x+1", with x being one integer lower than 10. So humans would use Base 9+1, and the alien would use Base 3+1.

*This has been on my mind all day and the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes how fundamentally terrible the name "Base-10" is. How did this never occur to the people who coined the term? Even the system I suggested is flawed as it's still trying to incorporate the same bad logic.

A better system would be something like Base 9, stopping shy of the respective 10 in each system, or if it needs to be clarified, Base 9+0, as 0 is the extra digit in the first place, not 10.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (18 children)

we'd only be able to represent bases for numbers with one digit though because what does base 15+1 mean? the 15 could be in any base higher than 5. the clearest way would probably be to just represent it with lines or something "base ||||||||||"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

wait until you find out about hexadecimal systems. It turns out we already have words for referring to numbers lol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

i know about hexadecimal, but what if you need to refer to a base larger than 16? i'm not saying it isn't possible to create symbols for every number, i'm saying if you have to describe your base with more than one digit, you encounter a problem of not knowing what base that multi-digit number is in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

well no, i know, i'm just saying that's it's not really that big of a problem, unless you're using octal, and you skill issue.

You should design base systems to be independent of each other, and hex does a really good job at this, because often times it's prepended with 0x to imply hex.

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