Is there any reason I can’t legally write checks in hexadecimal? America doesn’t have any official language, and I can’t imagine we’d have bothered to make decimal our official numbering system. I thought about writing checks in binary, but then I realized how much I might end up overpaying for things, if the clerk didn’t catch on. In order to make it obvious, I’d probably start with something calculated to give me a letter in at least one digit. Converting cents to hexcents (or whatever the term should be) would be a PITA.
I don’t see how that applies, because using hex doesn’t change the actual type of money being used. It’s still dollars & cents and the amount paid is still the same. The only thing that has changed is how you write down that amount.
The potential for misunderstanding is just too great; I’ve often heard people refer to, say, &H100 as ‘one hundred, hex’ - it isn’t one hundred at all of course, it’s two hundred and fifty six (in terms of actual real units).
If you pay someone 256 dollars as &H100, it might be nice if they cash it in as $100, but it could just as easily happen with a payment you’re receiving. It’s simply Not A Good Idea, or at least not any better an idea than some arbitrary scheme anyone might cook up such as meaning ‘1’ whenever they write ‘9’ and vice versa, or expressing the value as a complement of one hundred million.
“Checks are whatever you can get away with.” – not Marshall McLuhan
In short, a check has to be a physical object (in that an oral statement can’t be a negotiable instrument) that the other party (and the other party’s bank) will accept as payment in lieu of cash. It needs to have the recipent’s name, the payor’s signature and the name of his bank, the amount, the date, and some suitable words of conveyance (“pay to the order of” or the like).
That’s it. Beyond that, it’s up to what the parties involved want and what the banks involved will cope with. (The banks will transfer the information to a standard form if the check is on a cow or a shirt or something else the machines can’t cope with.) If there is no prohibition against non-base-10 numbers in the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) then hex is just fine.
If you want some fun, try explaining that 0xcafebabe is a valid number to the average bank teller.
