Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Luciano — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:07:48 GMT

try to look at some of the question posted on comp.embedded or comp.dsp and you will see by yourself ;)

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Leigh Ann — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:48:27 GMT

An interesting motivation for Bin/Hex is the way that I teach indexing in Arrays.

I feel that its really important that students understand that an index is not a magical number in memory that the computer jumps to, but rather an offset value for the size of your data. I require that my intro students, if they are given the memory address (in hex) of the start of the memory allocated for the array, and the size of each element of the array, that they can calculate the exact memory address of the nth element. (generally where n is a given value and not a variable - I want them to actually do the multiplication and addition).

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

orcmid — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:56:31 GMT

Understanding that representation is one of the critical ah-ahs in understanding computation. For example, learning that '0' and 0 are different. This only happens when character representation and the various number representations are grasped. (Scripting languages that hide this distinction by converting ASCII to number representations and back in a silent way don't help with this later on.)

If you ever use a debugger (and people want to do that as an avenue to understanding, unfortunately), expressions of internal representations are going to crop up.

Having said this about "ahas," the next one, I suppose is the indirection that relates to addressing and referencing. Even with built-in garbage collection, I think it is critical to know the difference between holding a reference and holding the (direct representation of the) thing itself.

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Rick — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:06:39 GMT

I'd say studying binary numbers (and hex, but maybe not octal so much) is still absolutely essential to computer science. However, if you are just a user of computers or only programming them at a very high level, then I suppose they're not so important. Regardless, if you are interested in how computers work, studying these number systems is important.

As you say, if you just want to understand decimal numbers better -- and don't care about their applications in computers -- then studying them is of use. Of course you could then argue why does it have to be a "power of 2" base? Why not base 5 or base 3? What I would say to that is that binary is still worthy of study as a special case place value system. The algorithms for conversion to/from binary are a bit simpler than conversion between non-binary bases. There are some insights to be gained from that.

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

rkpatrick — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:22:38 GMT

I still use hex for web colors (#FFCC99) as well as WPF (#00FFCC99), but the last time I used them with any kind of intensity was when I did ML on the Commdore 64 (home of the fabled nybble!). Every few years I come across the need for a bit mask, but for the most part I don't use them any more. Still nice to know them, though (bit masks can be quite cool, especially with bitwise booleans and using left shift/right shift (<</>>) to perform squares/roots in spite of the more common use of System.Math

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Tom — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:32:55 GMT

These bases, especially hex and binary, are still in very widespread use in industry, so I sure as heck hope that they are still being taught in schools!

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Luke Gedeon — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:50:43 GMT

Binary / Hex is still very important in design. Helps with color as mentioned, and also with image sizing.

We are also going to need another generation of bit level geeks as we re-factor all of our technology using nano-tech and light instead electricity.

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Baker Franke — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:29:23 GMT

I agree with those above. Binary is still important and fundamental to understanding some of the big ideas of C.S.

My students seem to appreciate it when I "pull back the curtain" on binary numbers. Even at the programming level understanding that EVERYTHING...EVERYTHING is eventually represented in binary helps explain all kinds of things. For example, why the largest positive int is (2^31)-1...why IP address segments don't get higher than 255...or RGB color values.

Binary is essential.

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Coding4Fun — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:12:58 GMT

Clint Rutkas here: Even though I think it will say I'm Coding4Fun.

I totally agree with Baker Franke too. Knowing why lots of stuff is 0 to 255 or 0 to 1023.

Hex is required for CSS and both binary and hex are required for a lot of hardware interaction. Right now a friend and myself for Maker Faire are arguing about the updating speed for an image that is getting send through a serial port.

I remember hearing my high school teachers a bit back saying they were going to stop teaching matrix math. Game development lives and dies on that matrix math.

re: Binary, Hex, Octal - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Kerry — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:07:27 GMT

Coding4Fun: Matrices are no longer taught in New Zealand high schools - they've added geometric transformations to the curriculum instead. A big loss for algebra at uni IMHO.

As a former maths teacher I think that we have to keep in mind that there is a trade-off in teaching between deep-narrow and shallow-wide. Do we introduce a lot of topics but not cover them in much depth, or do we narrow the topics covered and go into them with depth? Also, whilst binary/hex are useful for those who go on to do CS at uni and end up doing system-level programming, this is only a tiny percentage of the population - probably less than 0.1 percent in most countries - so such learning isn't critical to maths education.

CS education at high school level is essentially dead in New Zealand. Is this a bad thing? Possibly not, as any kid that is going to be serious about CS is probably going to be coding before they've even started high school.