Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: user-friendly hash formats, redux

[Nathan Myers]

On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 01:52:56AM -0800, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Nathan Myers <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > To me this is uncontroversial.  However, I see no merit at all in
> > the hexadecimal presentation of hashes.  The only issue I see is that
> > it is not instantly obvious what the best alternative to hex is.
> 
> I'm going to be horribly contrarian and say that I would rather see
> hex than any of the so-far proposed alternatives.  Hex, I know what
> that is, it's a big honking number.  I don't have intuitions about
> what nonsense strings (of any of the proposed variants) mean.

They're not numbers, they're just a pseudo-random sequence of on-off
signals, usually represented as electric charges or currents or 
magnetic domains present or absent, or reversed.  It's a lot more 
common to represent some bit pattern as "A" than to say it's 0x41 
or 65, and probably even more common that it shows up as certain 
brightness in the yttrium spots on somebody's monitor face.

But that's all neither here nor there.  What matters to us is, 
when presented 0x43a8e014f2 and 0x43da6c97ba, or JimPieCowCon and
JimFinGogBan, which are the ones you can remember long enough to 
recognize when you see them three seconds later, and can maybe
even type without cutting and pasting.

Nathan Myers
address@hidden