Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/10/13

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Subject: [Leica] re: more digital
From: Godfrey DiGiorgi <ramarren@bayarea.net>
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 15:14:34 -0700 (PDT)

>In fact "Digital" means using only the digits 0 and 1,  these
>numbers producing the simplest scale (binary scale) that uses
>positional notation where the value of each digit is multiplied
>by a power of the base depending on its position.

This is also incorrect. The digits in digital encoding are required to be
individual numbers. The dictionary I quoted earlier quoted the arabic
sequence from 0 to 9 as base10 decimal systems are generally speaking the
most common for numerical manipulation but you could have any number base
for representations. 

Computer systems generally use binary number representations because it's
so easy to represent a '1' and a '0' with an on-off switch and a little
bit electricity. But the number manipulations are generally operated on in
base10 arithmetic, thus the term "binary-decimal computing".

How you represent the numbers is independent of the encoding of the
information. 

Godfrey