Fwd: Dirty Words

["Eric M. Bennett" <ericb@pobox.com>]

Jay Reeve (jktr@dakotaconnect.com) wrote:

===================================
tedd wrote:
>Okay, all you smart FBer's, has anyone ever used base 36 for anything? If
>so, what?
>
>:-)
>
Well, now that you mention it, I've been thinking about posting on this
anyway. You just pushed me over the edge.

Businesses that need to record and display really huge integers, like
credit card transaction numbers, use base 36, where a single digit
(character) can represent up to decimal 36. (64 would be possible with
both upper and lower case, plus a symbol or two.)

If you decide to do this, watch out. Programmers at Citibank recently
were forced by customer complaints into a major re-programming project
because their numbers sometimes contained dirty words!

Their solution was to eliminate all vowels.
===================================



--
Eric Bennett (http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/)
Cornell University, Field of Biochemistry, 377 Olin Chemistry Lab

Gates apparently forgets that, while growing Microsoft, he was supported
by various governments with corporate, contract, and copyright law, to
name just three. And governments were there protecting him from IBM and
others with antitrust law. Hey, Bill, it's simply Microsoft's turn to obey
antitrust law.
-Bob Metcalfe, inventor of ethernet and general technology guru


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