Meme transcription:

Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?

Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”

        • @CanadaPlus
          16•7 days ago

          1 11 111 1111 11111 111111

          That’s base 1. By convention, because it doesn’t really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.

          • @Eheran@lemmy.world
            6•7 days ago

            Oh, I get it, was reading as base 2 and confused by that. Essentially Roman numerals without all the fancy shortcuts.

          • Doc Avid MorningtonEnglish
            0•6 days ago

            Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless…

            • @CanadaPlus
              3•6 days ago

              Theoretical computer scientists, historians of mathematics.

              I’m not sure where I heard the term exactly, but I know I have multiple times.

              • Doc Avid MorningtonEnglish
                3•5 days ago

                Thanks for sharing this, it’s quite interesting. I found a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

                Apparently, as you did suggest, “base 1” is a name that is used, but is somewhat a misnomer.

                The article mentions that Church encoding is a kind of unary notation, which I would not have thought of, but I guess it is.

                Enjoyable little rabbit-hole to zap my productivity for the day.