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There are 10 types of people in the world:
-Those who understand binary
-Those who don't
-Those who didn't expect a joke in trinary
-Those who keep it going with quaternary
-Those who cohort with quinary
-Those who use senary instead
-Those who think septenary is lucky
-Those who think octonary is prosperous
-And the Windows Naming Committee

See, 10.

Comments
  • 0
    @jschmold I jostled with which to pick as both are in common usage, trinary sounded better.

    And it wasn't gonna end with a windows joke, but...
  • 0
    @jschmold @daveslater I've never heard trinary, only ternary
  • 1
    @jschmold @deanveloper "ter" seems to come from a different source word than the rest of the list's words. Tria is the third cardinal number in Latin (or tres) so I'd have expected it to be trinary (please, never tresnary). But then, English isn't the most consistent of languages. Hehe
  • 1
    @daveslater wait, it's possibly an old enough word for that effect where a consonant and vowel in a syllable will swap. In trinary, the a from tria is dropped, so tres would be tre-nary, which could then become ternary. Perhaps not descended from tertius. Interesting.
  • 1
    @daveslater Wow that etymology!
  • 1
    @daveslater From the Online Etymology Dictionary (http://etymonline.com/index.php/...):

    "threefold," early 15c., from Late Latin ternarius "consisting of three," from terni "three by three," from ter "thrice," which is related to tres "three"
  • 0
    @MatiasConTilde so it was a case of jonny-come-lately when numbers larger than three got involved and they used the cardinal numbers for the roots of the rest? I love languages, even non-coding ones...
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