Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 461.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2025-04-13 07:38:51+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.458: sources of fascination in basic facts; octal or hexadecimal?

On Gabriel Egan's question: octal or hexidecimal? I'd say the latter,
definitely, for two reasons: first, the students have already been on a
bumpy road of binary etc for a time, and so need a new challenge;
second, hexadecimal raises the wonderful problem of representing beyond
what we are given, the more or less obvious, and so the problem of 
representation presents itself..

Yours,
Willard

On 13/04/2025 08:20, Humanist wrote:
>
>                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 458.
>          Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                        Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                         www.dhhumanist.org
>                  Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>          Date: 2025-04-13 00:11:50+00:00
>          From: Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>
>          Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.457: what sources of fascination?
>
> Dear Willard
>
> The students on my final-year undergraduate
> course 'Textual Studies Using Computers'
> start with binary encoding, ASCII, making
> logic gates (with mechanical relays), and
> programming in hand-assembled Intel 8080
> processor machine code. I do this because
> I think the underpinnings of all the modern
> digital miracles students have around them
> need to be grounded in some basic facts about
> what it means for a representation, especially
> of text, to be digital. For me the founding
> miracle of all is that we have a way to
> represent language inside a machine. It
> still boggles my mind that our predecessors
> figured out a way to do that.
>
> One thing I cannot settle on is whether,
> as a shorthand for expressing binary numbers,
> students should learn octal or hexadecimal. The
> former was big until the mid-1970s, when the
> latter began to be preferred. For my students,
> who are Humanities students -- English, Creative
> Writing, Journalism, History, Drama -- the octal
> system has the benefit of their needing to
> memorize only 8 patterns (000b to 111b) instead
> of 16 (0000b to 1111b). But it has the drawback
> that I can't find any assemblers that will
> output octal machine code, so if we use octal
> they cannot progress from hand-assembly to
> machine-assembly. Any Humantists' thoughts
> on that would be of interest to me.
>
> Regards
>
> Gabriel Egan


--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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