For the record, this is just windows. MacOS and (most) flavors of Linux use the standard SI units. And also, just because computers are base2 for the mathematics inside the processor, that doesn’t mean they have problems dealing with number other than 2^n. That would be equivalent to saying that humans can only use numbers like 10, 100, 1000 and nothing in between.
(The only area where things do get difficult is calculating with fractional values, such as 1/3 because the count of decimals needed to represent can vary depending on the base. For example, 1/3 is difficult to represent in base10 because it is infinite 0.333… however in base3 it requires only a single ‘decimal’/fractional digit 0.1.)
DaleGribble88@programming.dev 1 week ago
Good to know about MacOS and Linux. I usually never turn on the human readable mode on my distros because most are VMs.
Anyway, computer’s absolutely work best with working with numbers 2^n. That gives the most amount of space per bit. Otherwise, we would end up using the same amount of transistors for a fewer number of states. They could also greatly complicate the ALU to determine if it suddenly entered a forbidden state. Two’s compliment would certainly be much more difficult.
Submitting would be nearly impossible too