@acsawdey @foone noooo no no, not arbitrary 😂 you gotta have highly composite numbers

Each base-60 digit requires six bits, with a wastage of four redundant values (per every power of 60)

Now you could use that for error correction, or something else with the extra values — 0 to 59, then 0', 1', 2', 3'

You’d need 3 x 60-digits (18 bits) to exceed a short variable (32,767) that normally takes 16 bits

You’d need 6 x 60-digits (36 bits) to exceed a long variable (2 billion etc) that normally takes 32 bits

But of course the real fun comes in fractions — you need 2 x 60-digits (12 bits) to represent the 100 cents after a dollar, or the 240 old pennies after the “old” pound sterling

Decimal cents would normally need 7 binary digits on the end or taken off the big numbers, and 8 digits for the old pennies. Each cent would be 36 units of the 60^-2 power, and each oldpenny would be 15 units of the 60^-2. But they could cohabitate! And you could calculate them together.

Sadly, halfpennies (of the old type) and farthings are too small for this, so if you’re building a computer for use between 1222 and 1961, you’re out of luck.

(The new halfpennies were fine though — 36 units goes down to 18. They knew better and removed the old farthings and halfpennies from circulation a decade before decimalisation, and this allowed the transition to reuse the halfpenny idea with newpence; by the 1980s they were taken out again, when coins started replacing notes for entire pounds).

#base60 #binary #bit #digital