Why use other number bases when programming

Posted by JMD on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by JMD
Published on 2012-10-18T19:06:50Z Indexed on 2012/10/18 23:16 UTC
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programming-practices

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language-agnostic

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math

My coworkers and I have been bending our minds to figuring out why anyone would go out of their way to program numbers in a base other than base 10.

I suggested that perhaps you could optimize longer equations by putting the variables in the correct base you are working with (for instance, if you have only sets of 5 of something with no remainders you could use base 5), but I'm not sure if that's true.

Any thoughts?

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