Talk:ASCII/@comment-47535733-20201130201821

In the book, Wier even says ASCII "includes all the punctuation you will ever need" and then he turns around and adds a an additional question mark. In the movie they even faked an ASCII wheel with a question mark added. Why?

It can't be to save characters. An ASCII question mark is (in Hex) 3F, so you would only save 1 character by using a separate question mark, and only if you were asking a question.

Meanwhile, by adding the extra character, Watkins would now have to divide a 360 degree circle by 17, which comes to 21.17647 degrees, approximately. Whereas, if he just used the standard 16 hexidecimal characters that ASCII uses, he would be dividing by 16, giving 22.5 degrees. More importantly, it could just be laid out like a 16 hour clock, with 0 at the top, 8 at the bottom, 4 on the right, and "C" (12) on the left. Diagonals between those would give you 2,6,A and E. with the remainder between them. He would not even have to measure it.

So why the extra question mark?