Surely "1337" is the same as 1337, right?

bleistift2@sopuli.xyz to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 524 points –

Meme transcription:

Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?

Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”

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"11"

strings are in base two, got it

Wouldn't the answer be "10" in that case?

1+1=11 means base 1

How so?

1 11 111 1111 11111 111111

That's base 1. By convention, because it doesn't really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.

Oh, I get it, was reading as base 2 and confused by that. Essentially Roman numerals without all the fancy shortcuts.

Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless...

Theoretical computer scientists, historians of mathematics.

I'm not sure where I heard the term exactly, but I know I have multiple times.

Thanks for sharing this, it's quite interesting. I found a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

Apparently, as you did suggest, "base 1" is a name that is used, but is somewhat a misnomer.

The article mentions that Church encoding is a kind of unary notation, which I would not have thought of, but I guess it is.

Enjoyable little rabbit-hole to zap my productivity for the day.