Pentadactyl Compromise

Sand Star Astropecten articulata

  • Penta-dactyl (meaning ‘5-fingered’) beings, like humans, organize information in fives, tens, sometimes twenties.
  • Computers organize information using bits and bytes.

bits
off state  0 
on state  1 

  • And bytes are information units with eight bits, such as 10011110, 00101011, etc.

The difficulty is that ‘human syntax’ and ‘computer syntax’ don’t mesh well. For humans, the jumble of 0’s and 1’s is hard to comprehend; for computers, constant translation to ‘pentadactyl’ numbers (base 10) takes excessive programming time.

ASCII CHARACTER SET

Numbers, letters and symbols (“human coding”) are coded in “text” coding as single bytes:

HEXADECIMAL NUMBERS

There is a natural ‘middle ground’ (“computer coding”) that people can apply fairly well. That is the use of the number base 16 — the hexadecimal system.

  • It is compatible with the binary system; four binary digits = one hexadecimal digit.
  • The complexity is reasonably accessible to human ways of thinking, being neither too much nor too little.

Hexadecimal References
Conversion Table
Hexadecimal Addition Table
Hexadecimal Times Table


Donald Duck is the answer!

The Disney® character Donald Duck has only four fingers on each ‘hand’. Four is a multiple of two (the binary base) and a divisor of sixteen (the hexadecimal base). So we would say that Donald is well adapted to ‘computer syntax’, that for Donald counting on his fingers works naturally!