Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1461

Yes, I would. It's important from several standpoints, including data communications, file format conversions, and even machine architecture discussions. All that octets, bytes, and words stuff can be important even in today's world (depending on where the students end up in The Real World where Strange Systems are still in production use).

In our case, it's important because the mainframe environment we do our production coding in often generates dumps which are octal only.

You still get to do the decoding to ASCII on the fly. I'm going to write a decoder to change that, eventually, but that takes time.

In the contract position I had a year ago, hex decoding was important because that machine generated dumps in hex -- and the data was EBCDIC to boot, so my ASCII-FIELDATA knowledge didn't help me that much.

Knowing something about number conversions is also important when doing decoding-viewing of data messages on a communications line, and it can also be very important when doing text messaging between machines of different make or architecture (finding out why what you thought was a simple text message is breaking someone else's system).

We use ASCII almost exclusively at my current place of employment, but even vanilla ASCII has limits -- some systems have special uses for the most surprising characters, and since we're communicating with literally dozens of airlines we can't even buttume things like 80 character lines. The max safe screen size seems to be something like 14 lines by 63 characters. Others can use more advanced things if we know about it, but the default is the lowest common denominator.

Even I worked at NWA a few years ago we still had internal data feeds being translated between ASCII-EBCDIC or ASCII-FIELDATA on a regular basis, and sometimes all three for a single direction (since the IBM systems often used EBCDIC internally for data storate while the flight ops system was a Unisys system that mainly used FIELDATA, but the comm equipment only sent stuff as ASCII text between the two).

The fact that I'm a mainframer gives me a bias. I don't view all data as a simple ASCII stream ... but that's because it usually isn't in the my still somewhat brief programming career.

No. It needs to have some practical value. I think it still does.

-- OS-2 + eCS + Linux + Win95 + DOS + PC-GEOS + Executor = PC Hobbyist Heaven! WARNING: I've seen FIELDATA FORTRAN V and I know how to use it! The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.