Replying to Avatar Laeserin

Good guess. 😂

But the reason why I see it as a problem is that numbers imply order and these don't have any particular order, once you get past 00 and 01.

But the ordering of numbers allows a dev to just reserve 6000-10000, and come up with some harebrained scheme were he uses kind numbers as counters, or something.

And numbers are more limited because they're fewer characters to combine. You can get more combinations out of a short string than a long integer. That's why our keys contain letters.

So, no upside, but some downside.
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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

using letters thins out the possible meaningful namespace, but 32 bits human readable has been a tradition for a long time, macOS has used this format for file type magics forever and i've also used this format in my own binary encodings

totally there would be a way to compress them into a single number meaningfully, probably you could even have them as long as 6 characters and have almost no collisions just by simply summing the ascii code of each letter, and you can compress it further by allowing 3-6 instead of all 6

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