I still find weird that they didn't make A,B... just after the digits, that would make binary to hexadecimal conversion more efficient..

▲ iguessthislldo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Going off the timelines on Wikipedia, the first version of ASCII was published (1963) before the 0-9,A-F hex notation became widely used (>=1966):

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#History

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#Cultural_history

▲ jolmg 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The alphanumeric codepoints are well placed hexadecimally-speaking though. I don't imagine that was just an accident. For example, they could've put '0' at 050/0x28, but they put it at 060/0x30. That seems to me that they did have hexadecimal in consideration.

	▲	kubanczyk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a binary consideration if you think of it rather than hexadecimal. If you have to prominently represent 10 things in binary, then it's neat to allocate slot of size 16 and pad the remaining 6 items. Which is to say it's neat to proceed from all zeroes: `x x x x 0 0 0 0 x x x x 0 0 0 1 x x x x 0 0 1 0 .... x x x x 1 1 1 1` It's more of a cause for hexadecimal notation than an effect of it.

▲ jolmg 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Currently 'A' is 0x41 and 0101, 'a' is 0x61 and 0141, and '0' is 0x30 and 060. These are fairly simple to remember for converting between alphanumerics and their codepoint. Seems more advantageous, especially if you might be reasonably looking at punchcards.

▲ tgv 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[0-9A-Z] doesn't fit in 5 bits, which impedes shift/ctrl bits.

▲ vanderZwan 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure if our convention for hexadecimal notation is old enough to have been a consideration.

EDIT: it would need to predate the 6-bit teletype codes that preceded ASCII.