On: What is your best programmer joke?

[hkmurakami]

Apologies, but can someone explain this one to me?

    Q: Why don't jokes work in octal?
    
    A: Because 7 10 11.

[mhartl → hkmurakami]

The original joke goes like this:

    Why is 6 afraid of 7? 
    Because 7 8 [ate] 9.

In octal, this reads "Because 7 10 11", which doesn't work because our tendency is to read it as decimal, yielding "seven ten eleven".

[hkmurakami → mhartl]

Thanks! now it all makes sense :)

[Fishkins → hkmurakami]

I like another variant of the joke (which would work in octal): Q: Why was 6 afraid of 7? A: Because 7 was a registered 6 offender

[jdreaver → hkmurakami]

Quick octal explanation: In an octal system, each digit ranges from 0-7 (each digit in a binary system is either 0 or 1, or each digit in base 10 ranges from 0-9). Therefore, when you get to 8, you can't write 8; you have to use another digit and reset the first one back to zero, which gives you 10. 9 in base 10 is one higher than 8, so we just increment the first digit, which gives 11 in octal.

The original joke is: "Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9 (seven ate nine)." Obviously the original intent is lost when you use octal.

EDIT: Of course five of us decided to respond at the same time.

[smoyer → hkmurakami]

"Because seven ate (eight) nine" is the punch-line of another joke:

Why is the number six afraid?

[loser777 → hkmurakami]

It's a reference to the joke "why is six afraid of seven? ... because seven eight (ate) nine." I assume you get the octal part.

Greeting from TL.net.

[hkmurakami → loser777]

Greetings to you too! :)

[raverbashing → hkmurakami]

It's because that's 7 8 9 in octal

Now, you only need to get the '7 8 9' joke... Don't worry, I took a long time to get it.

[whatshisface → hkmurakami]

Octal is base 8. Base 8(7,10,11) becomes Decimal(7,8,9).

7 8 9 is from the old joke where seven ate nine.