http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=489434


in reply to Re^2: Programmers are weird
in thread Programmers are weird

Numbers like 512 and 8192 look strangely familiar to us; we think kilo equals 1024.
Not only, but also some of us -including me- know by heart 32768 and 65536. Though I've yet to meet anyone who knows the output of perl -le 'print 1<<24' or perl -le 'print ~0' (32-bit machine here!) in anticipation, albeit I suspect quite more than one does. Anyone here?

Ouch! Now that I'm staring at them I fear I will learn them by heart too... ;-)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: Programmers are weird
by seattlejohn (Deacon) on Sep 11, 2005 at 18:50 UTC
    1<<24? Sure. I even used that knowledge to show off like a dork in a statistics lecture in college. The prof was doing some kind of probability calculation that led to a result of 1 in 4^12, I think, and asked someone to punch 4^12 into a calculator and tell him what it was. Of course, 4^12 is 2^24, which I happened to know by heart was 16,777,216. (Why? It's the number of possible colors on a display that allocates one byte each to the red, green, and blue channels, and it just stuck with me.)

    When I rattled off that number a fraction of a second after his asking, without my calculator out, a bunch of folks in the lecture hall turned and looked at me like I was Rain Man or something. Of course, I was just lucky; I couldn't have done it if it hadn't been a reasonably common power of 2.

            $perlmonks{seattlejohn} = 'John Clyman';

[reply]
[d/l]
Re^4: Programmers are weird
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Oct 10, 2005 at 21:12 UTC

    In fact I know the entire 2x sequence for 0 <= x <= 18 by heart… Ah, the joys of programming assembler. :-)

    Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

In Section Meditations