Meme transcription:

Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?

Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”

            • @[email protected]
              16•6 months ago

              1 11 111 1111 11111 111111

              That’s base 1. By convention, because it doesn’t really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.

              • @Eheran
                6•6 months ago

                Oh, I get it, was reading as base 2 and confused by that. Essentially Roman numerals without all the fancy shortcuts.

              • Doc Avid MorningtonEnglish
                0•6 months ago

                Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless…

                • @[email protected]
                  3•6 months ago

                  Theoretical computer scientists, historians of mathematics.

                  I’m not sure where I heard the term exactly, but I know I have multiple times.

                  • Doc Avid MorningtonEnglish
                    3•6 months ago

                    Thanks for sharing this, it’s quite interesting. I found a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

                    Apparently, as you did suggest, “base 1” is a name that is used, but is somewhat a misnomer.

                    The article mentions that Church encoding is a kind of unary notation, which I would not have thought of, but I guess it is.

                    Enjoyable little rabbit-hole to zap my productivity for the day.

      • @Agent641
        1•6 months ago

        Strings are in base whatever roman numerals are.