in reply to Re: Re: SSN's possible new Y2K problem? in thread SSN's possible new Y2K problem?
Now I'm getting waaay OT, but I have to admit I've sometimes wondered if using base 36 for identifiers is such a great idea, because it's so easy to visually confuse 1 (one) with I (India) and 0 (zero) with O (Oscar). And if your letters could occur in either uc or lc form, the lower-case l (lima) is a problem too. That leaves us with 33 characters, just one above the nice round 2**5, so I've occasionally been tempted to argue for base-32 identifiers consisting of [0-9A-HJKMNP-Y]. Of course, the encode/decode logic would probably be a lot less efficient than base-36 ;-)
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