Brutkey

Joe Vinegar
@joe_vinegar@mastodon.bida.im

@soatok@furry.engineer I always found "unary" code as opposed to (or in analogy with) "binary" kind of a misnomer.
you still need two symbols, the "1" and the "absence of 1" or a terminator, or a synchronization marker, to tell where there is a 1 and where there is none. so it's just a specific variable-length numerical representation with a binary alphabet. Even the tally is still a binary code (in which you use an arbitrary number of consecutive "empty spaces" to represent "0").
In general unary codes just use "0" for the second symbol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

varx/tech
@varx@infosec.exchange

@joe_vinegar@mastodon.bida.im @soatok@furry.engineer I would disagree with calling it a terminator when you just stop writing more number. But in any case, wouldn't the same logic require decimal to have 11 symbols?

(By 11 I of course mean the result of 5+6, lest anyone get too clever. 😉)

Joe Vinegar
@joe_vinegar@mastodon.bida.im

@varx@infosec.exchange @soatok@furry.engineer I see your point, it's valid, and it provides a way to solve my discomfort with the term.
Probably my issue is that "unary" is used for both a numeral system and a set of codes (which use that numeral system, so totally legit).
Numeral systems are writing systems that imply the capability to tell empty space from the symbol, so the essential minimum binary possibility. But this aspect is implied and out of relevance for the numeral systems.
Instead it's important for codes, which need some synchronization mechanism to be actually used (read, transmitted), and unary codes are self-synchronizing (and are a case of binary code).
P.S. as @halosghost@chaos.social highlighted, the expansion of the base-1 (unary) representation works perfectly well as a positional representation.
Thanks everyone, I love you and this fediverse thing.