Re: The case of outnumbered numerator

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 3:01 PM, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Oh! Absolutely! But that is my point. If he is generating 100,000 new
numbers per year, then by using ABC...abc,,, he'd be using up 1 letter per
year. So, that simple solution would cover his butt for the next 52 years.

But your solution is not "simple". If you're talking about expansion,
then you have the issues that I mentioned at the end of my previous
post. If you're talking about your original proposal of keeping the
field the same size and type but "using a letter in the leftmost
position" then you have still not provided a solution, because you
have failed to preserve natural EBCDIC sort order. And in so doing,
you also introduce potentially a lot of extra logic.

The big advantage of preserving EBCDIC sort order is that you can do
straight comparisons. You can't do this with your proposal.

Finally, I don't know how you figure "52 years". I mean, I get that 52
happens to be the number of uppercase and lowercase letters in the
English alphabet. But if you're talking about lowercase letters
separately, then that adds yet another potential layer of logic to
your proposal. It's becoming less and less simple. Not simpler than
base 36, and not increasing the available space as much as base 36.

John Y.