Talk:DEC RADIX 50

Article name

This article was recently renamed from RADIX-50 to DEC Radix-50 with the comment original title too generic.

Several thoughts:

• Will there be forthcoming articles on HP Radix-50, Sony Radix-50, etc.?
• Granted, Radix-50 is a strange name, but surely it's in the same league as Hexadecimal?
• That few other manufacturers adopted Radix-50 doesn't mean that they couldn't have.
• Does/did DEC have it trademarked?
• Radix-50 seems the right name to me, though I was raised on it. All caps doesn't seem right.
• Google stats:
  • Radix-50 333,000 hits
  • "DEC Radix-50" 5 hits
  • (DEC OR Digital) RADIX-50 79,300 hits
  • "RADIX-50" -DEC -Digital 2,240 hits

—EncMstr (talk) 15:49, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

This article is about a character encoding, devised by DEC. It's not about "radix 50", as a generic concept. The other articles that could be named "radix so-and-so" (actually hexadecimal, vigesimal, etc., or base so-and-so) are about using a radix so-and-so. This article cannot fall in that category.

Hexadecimal, a.k.a. base 16 (and might as well be a.k.a. radix 16), is entirey different in nature.

There is still a redirect from "RADIX-50" to the new name.

keka (talk) 19:17, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

keka is technically correct. However, I think

this article should be named using the "common name" of this character encoding -- "Radix-50" --

rather than some other name that may be more technically correct,

to comply with the WP:COMMONNAME policy.

I suppose a few people may be looking for information on a literal "radix 50" generic concept. However, I think

the vast majority of people who use that phrase are referring to this character encoding.

So this article should be named "Radix-50" without any disambiguation,

to comply with the WP:PRIMARYUSAGE guideline. --DavidCary (talk) 00:50, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I searched for RAD40 and RAD50 before finding this. Some redirects may be useful.

C compilers on PCs can use a "RAD36" way of packing names consisting of chars A..Z and 0..9 only. 86.167.188.105 (talk) 21:22, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Can you elaborate on this? I couldn't find anything related to such an encoding on "RAD36". For completeness, if there is actually such an encoding we should either have an article about it or at least discuss it in a related article. But first, we'd need info on the actual name and the specifics of the encoding.

BTW. "RAD40" is a (rarely) used misnomer (redirect is meanwhile in place), the 16-bit variant was actually called "MOD40".

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:47, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Related to Base36?

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:48, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

I have changed the article to use the official spelling found in original DEC docs, that is, in uppercase and with space instead of a hyphen. A hyphen was apparently later used by third-parties, but for historical correctness we should stick to the original spelling.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:47, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

16-bit character encoding

Almost certainly I'm stupid and this is the wrong place to ask, but how exactly does one fit three 6-bit characters into a 16-bit machine word? 130.220.181.191 (talk) 08:09, 5 April 2016 (UTC)me

I think this is a good place to ask. The article really should describe how that works in an easily-understood manner.

First of all, the three values may have 6 bits, but the range is the restricted range from 0 to 39 (which is 40_decimal different values, 50_octal).

The normal range of 6 bits is zero to 63.

Secondly, combining the characters is not done by shifting and packing, but by multiplication. The maximum value is

39 * 40^2 + 39 * 40^1 + 39 =

62,400 + 1,521 + 39 =

63,961

Is that clearer? —EncMstr (talk) 05:49, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The article meanwhile explains this at least for one of the variants and one of the citations is quoted with further details.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:47, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Tables

I reverted the replacement tables to the original versions. The replacements were so confusing as to be unusable. — DAGwyn (talk) 04:59, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

DEC Squoze?

The given sources do not appear to mention this term, and a web search for the term finds only pages derived from this one. -- 2020-01-19T12:41:39 TEDickey (talk)

I found a 2005 web site using this term (this one was also used when the "DEC Squoze" term was introduced to this article). There might be older sources, but Squoze certainly wasn't anything official. I have therefore reworked the article to still mention it, but not in the intro any more.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:47, 19 June 2020 (UTC)