Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 471.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2025-04-17 08:07:36+00:00
From: Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.469: octal or hexadecimal
Thanks to the Humanists who have advised on
the desirability of having Humanities students
who are studying machine-code and assembler
programming learn either the octal or
the hexadecimal numbering system as a
shorthand for binary strings. It sounds like
hex is favoured.
Thanks to Henry Schaffer for suggesting use
of the 'od' (octal dump) utility available under
Unices, which does various kinds of displays
of binary data. The computers we are using
don't have anything as sophisticated as
Unix. We are using replica Altair 8800
computer running either no operating
system (so the students must first toggle
in bits using the front panel switches)
or at best either Microsoft BASIC or
CP/M version 2.2.
Regards
Gabriel
On 17/04/2025 08:15, Humanist wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 469.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> 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
________________________________________________________________________
Professor Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University. www.gabrielegan.com
Director of the Centre for Textual Studies http://cts.dmu.ac.uk
Teaching award: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/ntfs/professor-gabriel-egan
New Oxford Shakespeare https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/nos
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