-=> Neil Heller wrote to Jonathan de Boyne Pollar <=-

 NH> Base 36?  I've never seen or heard of base 36 being used outside of an
 NH> academic exercise.  Have you?

Yep, two uses, both BBS-related: it's used throughout RIPscrip, and to
represent the area number for replies in OPX (Silver Xpress format).

 NH> What's the necessity of this base?

It's (relatively) efficient -- it uses the minimum number of digits to
cover the maximum range of values, assuming that you're limited to 1-9 and
A-Z as digits. (In OPX, for example, a three-letter extension in base 36
covers areas 0 through 46655.)

Of course, you can get an even more efficient representation by making case
significant (as in base 64 MIME encoding), or by using characters outside
the strictly alphanumeric range (as in UUEncoding, also base 64).

 NH> Base 32, however, can be used as:
 ...
 NH>  sprintf(TargetStr, "0x%x", Source);

Um, that's base 16.

... The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output.
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