Re: Increment an alpha field by "1". My 2 cents...

Not to dismiss Antonio's comments for what they describe, because they are of course very relevant for describing the more generalized issue for the non-decimal digit representation. However, the issue that was originally being addressed, to /Increment an alpha field by "1"/, can be viewed as an effective odometer; even being representative of the more generic combination of decimal and alpha as was clarified later, as the slightly more complex issue. Simply incrementing one value to its next, is little different than rolling the numbers on an odometer, which is a very simple algorithm. That requires nothing more than to mimic /dials/ of a fixed set of glyphs as digits, for any number position. An array for each dial is a good data structure to represent the digits as elements.

From the original posting, there would seem to be no reason to use any more arithmetic than addition of one [increment by one] and overflow to zero. The odometer concept can not be much simpler; increment to the next element, and on to the next dial on overflow. Thus a solution to the given problem need not be as comprehensive as the more generic arithmetic proposed; i.e. no conversion to\from decimal would ever be required to solve the original issue.

Regards, Chuck

David FOXWELL wrote:

A deathly silence seems to have followed this last post in the
thread.

It brought shame on my own solution, and made me realize how
brainwashed I am. Great value for 2 cents!

Antonio wrote:

Folks, IMHO there's a much more straight forward way of dealing with
this kind of math (alpha plus numbers...)

Let's just remember we call our system as "decimal", just because any
number written as ABCDEF means F+E*10+D*100+C*1000+B*10000+A*100000
<<SNIP>>