Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Proposal for human readable revision IDs

[Andy Jones]

> I remain a bit sceptical that a 27
> arbitrary character sequence composed of upper and lower letters and
> digits (excluding a few) would actually be more readable (in any
> useful way) than a 40 digit sequence of hex digits.

+I+ would find it easier.

If you are unsure, test it out - see how long a string of letters the
people around you can remember, and how long a string of hex numbers. 
Or just ask them which they think they would find easier.

Of course you have to remember more numbers to get the same number of
bits, but even ignoring this I think you'll find that most people have
less trouble with letters.

The most easily readable of all would be to break the thing up into
vaguely pronouncable 'words' of about four or five characters each. 
Maybe just having consonent-consonent-vowel-consonent?

Mixing upper and lower case makes it harder to remember / compare /
type.  And I shudder at having to compare two strings from the full
unicode character set, where I couldn't even recognise half the
symbols....

> It would be shorter, and I can see that being an advantage.  As
> Nathaniel suggests, truncating the hash might be good enough?

I thought that there was a problem with that approach - the potential
attack outlined at the start of this thread?

For me, I'd ideally like something pronouncable.  But I think
splitting up the hash id into blocks of hex numbers would be a big
improvement.