Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 469.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2025-04-16 23:58:13+00:00
        From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.465: octal or hexadecimal

Working in the digital world accustoms one to finding efficient (aka easy)
ways of doing repetitive things. Looking at the bits in a byte (or any
string of bits) and inferring the meaning is a common task - perhaps
someone figured out a way to help? "od is one of the earliest Unix
programs, having appeared in version 1 AT&T Unix"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Od_(Unix)>  in 1971 or so. Here's what it
does:

DESCRIPTION

     The *od* utility is a filter which displays the specified files, or

     standard input if no files are specified, in a user specified format.

(quoting from the manual for the MacOS version.)


There are many options for this command - I often use the  -a  one which
displays the alphanumeric characters.
The bytes can also be displayed as octal characters (the usual 0-7) or as
hexadecimal characters (0-9,A-F).

So why take the time to memorize that the bits 1011 equal B in hex or 11 in
decimal?

--henry

P.S. Here's one example of a table
<https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.3?topic=adapters-ascii-decimal-hexadecimal-
octal-binary-conversion-table>
of the meanings of those bit strings.

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 3:29 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 465.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2025-04-14 09:52:46+00:00
>         From: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
>         Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.461: octal or hexadecimal
>
> Greetings.
>
> In Humanist 38.457, Gabriel Egan wrote:
>
> > One thing I cannot settle on is whether,
> > as a shorthand for expressing binary numbers,
> > students should learn octal or hexadecimal.
>
> I am not (employed as) a humanist, but...
>
> Like Willard, I would say hex, definitely, but for the slightly different
> reason
> that hex simply 'rhymes' better with the bytes that they'll presumably be
> using.
>
> Now that, post-70s, the world has settled on 8-bit bytes, it's tidy that
> any
> byte is representable with two 4-bit hex digits, as opposed to the 3+3+2
> of two-
> and-a-spare octal ones, like a stuttering rhythm.  A four-byte integer is
> straightforwardly twice-4 hex digits long, rather than 4 times 8 divided
> by 3
> octal ones.
>
> On the rare occasions I'd see octal digits now, they have an air of... I
> can't
> put my finger on it: something exotic but unglamorous.
>
> Gabriel, you also say:
>
> > For my students, [...] the octal
> > system has the benefit of their needing to
> > memorize only 8 patterns (000b to 111b) instead
> > of 16 (0000b to 1111b).
>
> In this context of a cross-campus course, it jumped out at me that you say
> 'memorize'.
>
> I wouldn't have thought to teach it that way, on my side of the campus, but
> then, I ask students to memorise almost nothing.  If I were introducing
> binary
> numbers, I'd say that 1001b was eightandoneisnine, and so on, with the
> expectation that that sum would get faster and faster with familiarity, to
> the
> point where a few salient numbers would be internalised directly.  This is
> not,
> of course, to disagree with you, but to reflect that it might illustrate
> what
> might be a difference in style across campus, with humanists (trained to
> be)
> comfortable remembering lots of material, in volumes that my students
> might (be
> trained to) find oppressive.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Norman
>
>
> --
> Norman Gray  |  https://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
> Lecturer  –  School of Physics and Astronomy
> & Principal Engineer, Educational Technology  –  College of Science and
> Engineering
> University of Glasgow, UK



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