Re: CHAT sedecimal (was: Graeco-Latin hybrids)

On 10/21/05, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> Well, considering that the compsci types I know usually contract
> 'hexadecimal'
> to 'hex', I'm inclined to think it might actually be a good thing we
> didn't end
> up with 'sextidecimal'. There is no way you can say "I'm working on a sex
> editor" without sounding lewd.

I thought the same thing. :) But in practice, I suspect that very issue
would tend to influence us against the truncation. It's hardly a given that
any name would be so treated; after all, one hardly ever hears the
corresponding abbreviations of "decimal", "octal", or "binary"[1]. It's true
that "sextidecimal" is rather more unwieldy than any of those, but I suspect
it would get abbreviated to "sexti" rather than "sex".

I suppose 'sedecimal' would contract to 'sed', which seems perfectly
> innocent.

Innocent? Have you ever *used* sed? It makes Perl seem positively
transparent. :)

[1] Odd collection of words, isn't it? "binary" comes from a distributional
number, "decimal" from an ordinal number, and "octal" . . . well, "octal" is
just weird.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>