Many early computers had 36 bit architectures (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/36-bit) and octal makes a lot more sense for them, as 3 divides into 36 very nicely (12 has a lot of factors). Four also divides but its an odd number.
Octal numbers in Computer Programming [duplicate]
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28-06-2022 - |
Question
I'm a college programming student with two years of programming experience in Java and Python. We've talked about number systems in classes including Binary, Octal, and Hexidecimal. I understand why Binary and Hexidecimal are important in Computing but I don't see any benefits to using Octal numbers. What would be some examples of Octal number use in programming?
La solution
Autres conseils
The reason why we use octal is in many ways the same as hexadecimal: we need a human readable format to quickly Identify bit strings. Just like the bit pattern of large binary data can (relatively) easily be described/specified and understood using hexadecimal, where each digit represents the exact binary pattern of for bits, where ever you would want to easily understand the bit string in groups of 3 you would use octal
the best example will be the unix file permissions: the read write and execute permissions for the owner,group, and 'other' users fall logically into 3 groups of 3 bits (rwxrwxrwx) it is most convenient to describe these logical blocks using octal. eg: rw-r--r--
will be 110100100
or 644