Re: OT: Number bases

Hi!

Mark J. Reed writes:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 6:57 AM, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>> Ah, now I understand what you mean.  You're right.  So you'd expect a
>> ternary CPU'd still have both signed and unsigned arithmetics even if
>> the CPU was build with balanced ternary logic in mind?
>
> No, I wouldn't. While, as with two's complement, the basic truth
> tables at the single-trit level is the same (given states 0, 1, and X,
> the result of adding two trits is the same whether X is treated as -1
> or 2),  the carry out is different, so hardware adders would have to
> be designed explicitly one way or the other.  So the choice has to be
> made sooner, at a more fundamental level.  I was just pointing out
> that it was still a choice. :)
Argh. :-)   So we're discussing this just because you wanted to nitpick?
Well, well! :-)))

So I can still rightfully hope for ternary computers to eliminate
unsigned ints!  Maybe one day, when Moore's law will have failed us,
someone finds some trick that can make electronic circuits smaller,
but only if they use ternary logic.

All hackers who can sing 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024,
2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144 in their sleep
will cry and will have to learn a new series just to be called
'hacker'!  And in C, which will undoubtfully still be around, we need
a new number prefix for base 3 (oh wait, 0b is not standard C), base 9
(base 4 is not used either), and base 27.  And how to we write the
balanced base 27 digit -10 in C??  Maybe we use UPPER CASE!

I once wrote a source code obfuscator that reformatted all numbers to
base-3 (including chars in C).  That's really hard to read for the
average hacker. :-)

**Henrik

Reply