Heh.  Let me tell you about my mother.  She wrote numerical simulations of surface-to-surface missile trajectories in the 1950s - <i>in octal</i>.  She thought life was great when she got an assembler.<p>She complained to me about these &quot;dumb physicists&quot; who couldn&#x27;t get through their heads that changing a constant took ten minutes, but changing a formula took all day.  Note well:  These &quot;dumb physicists&quot; are <i>literally</i> rocket scientists.<p>I do pretty well at this computer stuff, with the tools I have available, but write numeric code in octal?  I&#x27;m not sure that I&#x27;ve got what it takes to do that.