#1-3
01 января 1987 |
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Shoutburst 2 - no hex please, we're british.
NO HEX PLEASE, WE'RE BRITISH. by Ron Cavers In 1714 a British patent was obtained for a new machine. It was over 150 years later before a commercially successful model was produced (by the Yanks, of course) and the typewriter slowly eased its way into our lives. Most people are aware that the QWERTY keyboard system was incorporated to prevent the mechanical type bars from jamming when typing at any speed greater than mine and, as we then had to wait another 100 years for the electronic typewriter, it is forgiveable that the QWERTY system should stick in spite of some heroic attempts to dislodge it. What has this to do with Hex? Well, when computers arrived, the obvious solution to storing information in electronic form was to use (put simplistically) bank, after bank of switches which could exist in two states - either on, or off. Thus a bank of eight switches could be set to, say, OFF/ON/OFF/OFF/OFF/OFF/OFF/ON and this could be recognised as the eight-bit binary number 01000001 which in turn could be converted to its decimal equivalent of 65. Great. But the early computers didn't start off with the ready- made languages, like Basic, Lisp and Pascal, the programmers had to get in there and convert their real-world numbers and letters directly into binary - which was a bit of a headache to say the least. So hexadecimal came into general use as a sort of halfway house where decimal numbers could be converted to base 16 counting (Hex) which in turn could be converted to binary - and back again - the whole process being easier than a straight conversion. I think the inevitable happened - programmers began to "see" the Hex equivalents of the real world far more easily than they ever did with binary and decimal just became a nuisance. Thus the myth was born that machine code programming should be done in Hex. Now, in electronics, things moved far more rapidly than they ever did in mechanics - in both senses! High-level programming languages were developed and Assemblers used to write machine code. The need for Hex has long passed - we still need binary and any machine code programmer has to be aware that this is how the real world is represented in the machine and occasionally the conversion still has to be made depending on the program being written - but bear in mind that an 8-bit binary to decimal conversion table can be held on a single sheet of A4 paper or a specially written program used (see elsewhere in this issue) so there is no need to use Hex as an intermediary. I am a very open-minded individual (too easily swayed, sometimes!) but I challenge anyone who may be reading this to convince me that Hex is in any way useful. The only time I ever use Hex is in trying to interpret the results of a package that allows me to assemble machine code in decimal but refuses to do anything else except in Hex. Refuses to let me peek a decimal address, trace from a decimal address, break in at a decimal address, or anything that will allow me to run and test my code under controlled conditions using decimal. Until you have done this, you have no idea how absolutely frustrating and infuriating this is - you finally leap to your feet clenching fistfuls of hair screaming - "FETCH ME THE PROGRAMMER WHO WROTE THIS, I'LL MAKE HIM EAT IT WITH LIQUID PARAFFIN!" Make no mistake, programming in machine code is harder than in Basic but don't let anyone kid you that you need to work in Hex - it just isn't true! So, back to the typewriter analogy. If the golf-ball or daisy wheel typewriter had come along in time could we have easily made the change and got rid of QWERTY? Speculative and pointless. However, I do not think this is true of Hex. It is my opinion that we have just passed a crucial crossroad in the life of Hex and now is our last chance to get rid of it FOREVER! So strike up the band! Take up the banner! March on ... er, Whitehall. NO HEX PLEASE, WE'RE BRITISH!.
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