[Freedombox-discuss] assigned numbers without ICANN

[Thomas Lord]

On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 22:48 -0700, Dave Crossland wrote:
> On 28 April 2011 19:08, Thomas Lord <lord at emf.net> wrote:
> >
> >  All of the routing IDs we'll talk about here are written
> >  as 10 character numbers in base 36 (more than 51 and less
> >  than 52 bits).
> 
> Base 34 is better, eliminating L and 0 from the mix, since they are
> easily confused with 1 and 0 :)

That is a problem for font designers to work on. :-)

More seriously: for at best the minor gain of avoiding 1 / l 
and 0 / O conflation, that would add complexity to small
snippets of code from now until forever.   For example,
regexps couldn't use:

    [a-z0-9]

they would have to use:

    [a-km-np-z0-9]

That kind of thing.

Plus, 7 characters base 36 holds almost an entire
bit's worth of information more than 7 characters
base 34 -- which kind of matters for this design.

-t