Re: interactive spec with reasonable numbers for c-u

[Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com>]

all i know about the decision to use 4 is the tutoria in 1980s that
asked the user if he or she thought 4 was a good choice.

i belive it was for navigation.  i thik some interactive spec that
spits out a symbol like, this syuntax is maybe wrong but the semantics
would be like (interactive "x" apple banana cherry rest) where x is
whatever character is unassigned for this purpose and if c-u, arg gets
apple; c-u c-u arg gets banana.  and perhaps rest gets whatever the
arg to c-u is if that is ever used.

which is what elispers would want instead of taking the log of a base
4 number.  drawing from my sample of n=1.

On 9/9/22, Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> wrote:
> Samuel Wales wrote:
>
>> dna has 4 base pairs that comes in sequences. so loosely
>> speaking it is base 4 arithmetic. of coure it is not that
>> simple and i am not making the claim that arithmetic per se
>> is performed. among the lack of simplicity, there are
>> codons, there is rna which substitutes uracil, and probably
>> various other footnotes. but it's not wrong to say that our
>> dna has 4 nucleotides in sequences.
>
> Ah, of course, DNA!
>
> Cool, but surely that isn't the reason why we have that
> sequence in Emacs? :O
>
> $ for i in {0..4}; do echo $(( (2**2)**i )); done
>
>   1
>   4
>  16
>  64
> 256
>
> Here's an interesting textfile BTW,
> https://dataswamp.org/~incal/data/BINARY-UNITS
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   BINARY UNITS
> incal@dataswamp.org
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>       unit              bytes               bits             max value
> (eval)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  char/byte                  1                  8  (1- (** 2    8))
>       word                  2                 16  (1- (** 2 (* 8
> 2)))
> doubleword                  4                 32  (1- (** 2 (* 8
> 4)))
>   quadword                  8                 64  (1- (** 2 (* 8
> 8)))
>  paragraph                 16                128  (1- (** 2 (* 8
> 16)))
>   kilobyte              1 024              8 192  (1- (** 2 (* 8
> 1024)))
>   megabyte          1 048 576          8 388 608  (1- (** 2 (* 8 (** 1024
> 2))))
>   gigabyte      1 073 741 824      8 589 934 592  (1- (** 2 (* 8 (** 1024
> 3))))
>   terabyte  1 099 511 627 776  8 796 093 022 208  (1- (** 2 (* 8 (** 1024
> 4))))
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>                                                        (defalias '**
> #'expt)
> 1 kilobyte = 1024^1 bytes
> 1 megabyte = 1024^2  -"-
> 1 gigabyte = 1024^3  -"-
> 1 terabyte = 1024^4  -"-
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/data/BINARY-UNITS
> 2022-09-10
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> --
> underground experts united
> https://dataswamp.org/~incal
>
>
>


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