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Pick a number between 1 and 10

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mouser:
My guess would be that decimal based would be considered the default.  Therefore if one sees 0xFF on the page and says "two hundred and fifty five," one would be correct.
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Well I was really asking if there was a logical way to speak such numbers WITHOUT converting them first to base 10 and speaking in base 10.

MilesAhead:
My guess would be that decimal based would be considered the default.  Therefore if one sees 0xFF on the page and says "two hundred and fifty five," one would be correct.
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Well I was really asking if there was a logical way to speak such numbers WITHOUT converting them first to base 10 and speaking in base 10.
-mouser (February 27, 2015, 02:36 PM)
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I'm self taught so I'm not sure of the conventions.  But my assumption would be anything spoken without the base specifier would be assumed to be decimal.  So if the written number was 0x0F I would either say "F Hex" or "fifteen."

I guess if it was a long decimal base number and I didn't want to take the time to figure out what it was, like 103023345665432445 I would just read out the digits and the listener would assume it was decimal unless specified otherwise.

Deozaan:
Far be it from me to inject a real question into this thread, but here is a real question:
In our normal base 10, we have a protocol for SPEAKING large numbers, so 154 is "one hundred and fifty four".
Using the same logic, what would be the generic method for similarly SPEAKING large numbers in other bases?
-mouser (February 27, 2015, 12:46 PM)
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IMO writing and speaking are two different things. Words don't mean anything, except the meaning we give them. Spoken words are sounds that represent ideas. Written words are symbols to represent ideas. Neither spoken nor written language has any inherent meaning. Otherwise we wouldn't have to learn how to speak/write other languages. "15" does not mean "fifteen" just as it doesn't mean "0x0F". However, from a mathematical point of view, when talking about the numbers these symbols/sounds represent, 15 is equal to fifteen is equal to 0x0F. Therefore they can be used interchangeably. Since (to the best of my knowledge) nearly all humans use base-10 when speaking numbers, it would be correct to pronounce 0x0F as the base-10 equivalent (15) in the language you are speaking.

It's all just a different way to say the same thing. We encounter the same issue in spoken languages as well. I might say "fifteen" but someone who doesn't speak English will have no idea what I'm talking about. Or even if someone does understand English, but the rest of the conversation is happening in French, someone would be understandable confused if I suddenly said "fifteen" using a different language.

In other words, use the language you will be understood in, as determined by context and requirements (obviously you should say/write 0x0F if you're talking about a computer data type that must be in hex) of the overall conversation.

Of course, part of the point of a riddle is to be tricky. And saying "ten" when you're talking about "10" in binary is intentionally misleading, not to mention technically incorrect. That's why it works better as a written riddle/pun. Because you're not giving yourself away that you really mean "two", e.g.,:

There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

tomos:
You could do something like the imperial monetary system (£sd) that we had till 1970.
It starts with a penny (1d)
then you have a thrupenny bit,
then a 6 penny bit, then:
12 pence = 1 shilling
20 shillings = 1 pound (£1) = 240d (i.e. pence)

To complicate things further, there was:
four farthings or two hapennies to a penny,
a twobob (2 shilling) coin (=24 pence - but also 1 tenth of a pound (!)),
and two-shillings & six-pence (2.5 shillings = 30 pence) as a half-crown coin (even though the crown coin no longer existed)

Not sure what base that all is though :-\ :P

x16wda:
Not sure what base that all is though
-tomos (February 27, 2015, 05:17 PM)
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Base villain.

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