On Sep 17, 7:50*am, "Nancy Young" > wrote:
> Krypsis wrote:
> > Back in pre-computer days, usage of the different number bases would
> > seem odd. These days however, with the advent of computers,
> > Hexadecimal, Octal & Binary do indeed serve a purpose in mathematics.
> > I have a friend who can program in Direct Hexadecimal because he has
> > ALL the codes memorised.
>
> That's the first language I learned, machine code. *Tedious, but very
> handy to understand later if you were a mainframe programmer. *I
> have no idea if it's still useful in the pc age.
>
> nancy

Some people still code on the bare metal. For consumer PCs, not so
much. But for things like microcontrollers and FFGPAs and small
processors for which no higher-level compiler is written you'll see
people writing in assembler. I haven't studied assembler much, but my
guess is that it has a huge learning curve, but once you are past that
it makes incredible sense as it is down at the level where hardware
and software blur. "I'm flipping these bits and turning transistor
arrays on and off" kinda stuff. In the Atmel controllers, for
instance, you still code in C, but there is a lot of poke/peek stuff
at hardware addresses which are assigned in hexidecimal, so it
sometimes feels like assembly language.

In the PC world, the trend is going up to higher and higher level
languages. C and C++ for system-level and major application stuff,
and interpreted languages (Java, Perl, and whatever flavor of the
month prototyping language) is getting more and more common for
smaller apps and 'glue'.

-J