Java Term of the Week: Denary

For the next few weeks the Java terms of the week will be based on numbering systems that are used in the programming world. I thought it might be best to start with the system we have all been using since primary school – the denary numbering system (also known as the decimal system). If you cast your mind back you should be able to remember writing out hundreds, tens, and ones as column headings to help you figure out the size of a number.

I suppose you could say that it's incredibly obvious that the denary system uses the numbers 0-9 and is a base ten system. Perhaps so obvious as to make you ask why would I mention it? Well, once you realize that you intimately know one numbering system, the ones that come in the following weeks won't be so hard to pick up. They follow the same rules, they just work off a different set of numbers (sometimes letters too) and a base number that isn't ten.

The fact that we count using units of ten is probably because we have ten fingers and to do anything else might seem a bit strange. Computers on the other hand are not fond of the denary system. I suppose if they had been invented with fingers it might have been a different story.