Alphanumeric Transdecimal Digits

The **Alphanumeric Transdecimal digits**, commonly called "**computerese**" among base analysts, are a proposal for numerals used in transdecimal number bases, where the letters of the English alphabet is used as digits denoting the values of ten through thirty-five.

There is no universal convention to use lowercase or uppercase, so each is prevalent or preferred in particular environments by community standards or convention; even mixed case is used, as in how seven-segment displays use AbCdEF (for hexadecimal) so that digits B and D could be distinguished from 8 and 0 respectively.

## Usage

They are **by far** the most widely used transdecimal digits for all bases in the range of 13-36. Their most common use is in hexadecimal (base 16), to the point where even the biggest proponents of argam like De Vlieger print hexadecimal tables using computerese.

Many fonts for different transdecimal numeral proposals (e.g. *Vinci Firenze Argam*) encodes digits 10 through 35 in the Unicode range for the lowercase letters a through z.

### Dozenal

Dozenal (base 12) is the only transdecimal base in the computerese scale (bases up to 36) where these digits aren't the most commonly used option. Instead, dozenalists most commonly use X and E (derived from the dwiggins transdecimal digits  and ), or argam digits dess () and ell (). However, A and B are also very acceptable; for example, the Wikipedia article on Dozenal uses this notion for consistency, and that other transdecimal symbols are not widely supported by Unicode. This can extend to undecimal (base 11).

### Hexadecimal

 File:Abcdef casio.JPG
On the flip side, hexadecimal (base 16) is the biggest proponent of computerese, because it is the transdecimal base most favoured by computers. Even the biggest proponents of Argam digits often write their hexadecimal tables in computerese.

## History

During the early history of computers, there were no universally-accepted proposal for transdecimal number bases, and many symbol sets were hexadecimal solutions.

## Pros and cons

### Pros

* Alphanumeric digits are widely supported by many systems.
* They are easy to learn and recognize since the English alphabet is very commonly used.

### Cons

* Lack of diversity from the alphabet - when writing some numbers, the numbers end up looking like words. The intensity of this is pretty low in hexadecimal, but it increases with every extra digit.
* The letters I, O and X can be confused for the digits 1 and 0, and the multiplication sign respectively. Sometimes, especially when the base is almost 36 but not quite (usually the range of 32-35), some letters are omitted to avoid confusion. It is also known to omit I in base 20, using J as digit 18 and K as digit 19.
* The alphanumeric digits are not organic symbols and can be confused with variables, mathematical and scientific constants.
* The digits are only universally defined up to numerals for base 36, meaning that it cannot be used for very large number bases without additional symbols.

## Extensions and Variants

* Since the letter O can easily be confused with 0, the Greek letter theta (Θ) can be used as a replacement.
* The computerese numeral set can be extended to higher bases and digits beyond Digit-35/base 36, using either different alphabets or lowercase letters. The second option is more prevalent, as using non-ASCII characters defeats the purpose of computerese in the first place.
* Base 64 has been known to use an extended Computerese system, where the digits 36-61 are the lowercase letters a-z, and digits 62 and 63 are special characters like - and \_. YouTube URLs use this system.
* The Recset numerals use a multiplicative approach to expand the system up to Digit-149. To tackle the problem of I and O conflicting with the numerals 1 and 0, zero is written with a slash in the middle (slashed zero), and one and I are written with serifs.

Numeral Sets