Question

This may be very convoluted and twisted idea. Got it while learning some JavaScript. It piqued my mind. Hoping there may be someone else who would have thought about it before or might enlighten me 🙂

var n = 17;

binary_string = n.toString(2);        // Evaluates to "10001"
octal_string = "0" + n.toString(8);   // Evaluates to "021"
hex_string = "0x" + n.toString(16);   // Evaluates to "0x11"

This made me probe more into bases. I remembered my Digital Engineering course and understood that for every number from 10 for a base greater than 10 will be started naming from ‘a’, ‘b’ onwards.

for eg:

var n = 10;
var y = 11;
string = n.toString(12); // Evaluates to 'a'
string = y.toString(12); // Evaluates to 'b'

Then I understood this could go uptil ‘z’
Thus

var n = 35;
string = n.toString(36); // Evaluates to "z"

But that seems to be the end. if we do

var n = 35;
string = n.toString(37); // Gives error Error: illegal radix 37 { message="illegal radix 37", more...}

Thus I believe we can only count up to the bases of 36. since for a base 37 counting system, we wont be able to count 36 since we exhausted English characters. Is there anyway we can do it? Maybe we can add other characters.

I know it is very useless thing, and never in life will we ever need it.

But have anyone thought about it already?

Answer 1

see my question here. What symbols are used after base 36