30 Aug
2006
30 Aug
'06
5:39 p.m.
I have heard of [octal], and [...], but unlike Hex,
Dec and Binary I
have no idea what it could be used for, and why it would still be
used today.
Just as hex is appropriate whenever you have bits naturally occurring
in groups of four, octal is appropriate whenever you ahve bits
naturally occurring in groups of three. Examples that come to mind
immediately include PDP-11 (and to a lesser extent 8080) machine
languages, any machine whose word size is a multiple of three bits (eg,
12- or 36-bit machines), and Unix file permission bitmasks.
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