Base Converter

Why Build a Base Converter?

After all, anyone who works with various bases probably knows how to convert between them. In fact, most programming languages include tools for easily doing the conversions. Occasionally I have a need to quickly decode binary strings or convert decimal numbers to hexadecimal when working with colors. However, the reason I originally built this tool (decades ago now), was because of the following story.

I had been a player in a friends Star Wars themed tabletop RPG. My character (Niko) was a slicer who had come across an unfamiliar alien computer system. The Game Master wanted it to be difficult to pull information from the system, so that it would take longer for my character to do some task. The difficulty they decided to describe was not in the alien language (which could be translated), but in their math and numbering system.

Apparently, this alien race thought differently and used Base 7 for their numbering system and mathematics. Unlike binary, octal, decimal, or hexadecimal, which are frequently used in programming, septenary is a bit more unconventional. The Game Master thought this was enough of a barrier to cause my character some consternation. And truthfully, trying to think in septenary would be difficult, but ultimately is completely unecessary.

After all, it's quite simple, as demonstrated here, to create a converter. It would be just as easy to build this converter into whatever scripts are parsing and translating the alien language. This way, the numbers would be translated to decimal or binary (or any other base) along with the language.

Hence the base converter. It was more to prove a point than anything else, though I do occasionally use it for quick testing.