On 2020-10-10 11:31:23 +0200, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
> On 2020-10-07 20:10:34 +0530, Hemil Ruparel wrote:
> > Sorry if this is silly but if it is a 128 bit number, why do we need 32
> > characters to represent it? Isn't 8 bits one byte?
>
> Yes, 8 bits are 1 byte. But that's 256 different values, so to display
> them in 1 character you would need 256 different characters. That's not
> possible in ASCII (ASCII has only 94 graphic characters), and even if
> you included accented characters and other alphabets (like Greek or
> Cyrillic) it would be hard to read.
I'm showing my European bias here.
I should have thought of Korean. The Hangul script is syllabic with a
very straightforward and easy to learn structure. Wikipedia tells me
that they have 19 consonants and 21 vowels, so you could just pick 16
consonants and 16 vowels to construct 256 syllables. That would even
make UUIDs pronounceable.
hp
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_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
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