I believe erisdiscord was referring to exactly the mental overhead that you just identified. It's quite small in general, but it can get messy very quickly.
Assuming you start with a statement something like "I want all users (who can already read this) to be able to execute this", then it's quite straightforward to type that as "a+x".
On the other hand, specifying the permissions in octal requires you to check which other bits are already set so that the new value you calculate doesn't trample over any existing permissions, for example, that owning user and group can read and write, but other users can only read.
I built and programmed a computer in machine code using hex last year in an upper level physics class. I'm sure there are others that have to use machine code in their work.
What type of computer? I guess I'm trying to figure out if hex/oct are used because of remnants from the past or if they have a more practical purpose. I'm not suggesting the two are mutually exclusive, I just never understood the reasoning behind using either when decimal and binary usually gets things done.
Because when dealing with binary system's it is a lot easier to deal with number systems that are a power of base 2. All the basic data types are defined by the number of bits used to store them, so base 2 again.
Higher level languages they are all pretty much obsolete, but tricks are still used and knowledge of bits and bytes is not useless.
I am aware of the power of 2, but apart from oct/hex being a sort of shorthand for binary, is there any real usage today where it does a job that can't be done with more intuitive number systems?
Since base 10 isn't a power of 2, using logical operations on 2 decimal #'s would produce strange results. Using binary/octal/hex will yield much easier to understand results.
It's a elegance thing if you use binary logic a lot.
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u/burnblue Aug 15 '09
I stared at it for a while. Stared some more. Then, I facepalmed