Re: Octal vs. Hex war o' death

H. Peter Anvin
2000-11-30T00:53:39Z

Followup to: <20001129181723.A2765@potty.housenet>
By author: Jeff Epler <jepler@inetnebr.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 04:27:04PM -0700, Ian S. Nelson wrote:
> > c) octals were invented for UNIX file permissions and not
> > programming
>
> You must be joking. Read much history of computing? Or
> alt.folklore.computers? Octal was very natural for 18- and 36-bit
> machines, after all.
>

Not to mention that it's still quite natural for a lot of machines.
If you ever look at raw x86 machine code, with it's 3-bit fields,
byteized octal actually makes it quite easy to read.

Octal probably predates hexadecimal, since it fit within the 0-9
digits most people used. Hex is really the natural choice for
modern power-of-two-width machines, though.

-hpa
--
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."