- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor
- [email protected]
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…”
How so?
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.
Oh, I get it, was reading as base 2 and confused by that. Essentially Roman numerals without all the fancy shortcuts.
Closer to tally marks without clustering
Based
Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless…
Theoretical computer scientists, historians of mathematics.
I’m not sure where I heard the term exactly, but I know I have multiple times.
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.
No problem!