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The Hindu–Arabic numeral system is a positional decimal numeral system, and is the most common system for the symbolic representation of numbers in the world.

Is this statement true? I guess the binary code for characters or opcodes is not a number. Not sure about addresses.

darsie
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  • This question appearently is off topic on superuser.se and someone suggested math. Doesn't seem to be much about math, but where else could I ask it? – darsie Nov 19 '18 at 14:44
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    It's kind of a meaningless/unanswerable question without further parameters. If the internals of a computer do not count as numbers, what about if I write c = 100 in my Python script? Is that decimal? Binary? Are you asking about written numbers? How people think about numbers? – Mees de Vries Nov 19 '18 at 14:47
  • The decimal number 100 as string '100' represented by the bytes 0x313030 is decimal. The binary number 100 as string '100' represented by the bytes 0x313030 is binary. The number 100 represented by the bits 0b1100100 on hard disk/RAM is binary. Numbers written on paper, with computers etc. count. Thought/spoken numbers count ("8 is 100 in binary.") Counting how many people use decimal or binary most commonly seems to be a valid approach, too, but that's not what I meant. – darsie Nov 19 '18 at 15:19
  • If those are your parameters the answer is probably "binary", since there are more computing devices on the planet than people, and they would deal almost exclusively with binary numbers, and process far more in a few seconds than a human in a year (or even a lifetime). But note that that doesn't make the claim on Wikipedia false -- it might just be answering the question with different (implicit) parameters. – Mees de Vries Nov 19 '18 at 15:27
  • The bit pattern 0b1101001010101110 representing the assembly instruction 'add a1,a2' is not a number. Neither is the binary code 0b01000001 for the character 'A'. I'd say 0b00110001 for the character '1' is not a binary number but a decimal number (or digit), if used in a numeric context, but not in non numeric context like 'peer2peer'. – darsie Nov 19 '18 at 15:32

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This question is vague, and the answer depends entirely on how you count representations to determine what "most common" even means.

If you count the number of people who use it regularily, then decimal wins by a landslide. If you count the number of man-made representations of numbers here on Earth (and possibly the few we've sent to space), then clearly binary numbers outnumber decimal numbers.

I'm sure I've missed quite a few other different interpretations of "most common". So there is not one right answer until you decide to pin down concrete definitions one can actually work with.

Arthur
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