gnupg: request for small change in output

[Jeff McAdams]

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Also Sprach John A. Martin
>Think of the ID as an arbitrary string that must match another
>arbitrary string.  The fact that the string happens to be a string of
>hexadecimal characters is immaterial to the match.

That's a better way to think of it...but its still inconsistent with
what the rest of the world does and the way most people will think of
it.

For one data point, *I've* always found it confusing.  Not so much that
it has really hindered my use of pgp/gpg, but it has always bugged me.

>One might argue that ornamenting the ID with '0x' might be deceptive
>suggesting that is useful as an arithmetical quantity.

It is.  It is a hex number, it could be converted to octal, it *is*
converted to binary (by the computer, though we don't typically take
note of it), it can be converted to base 10, it can be sorted (which
will basically work without treating it as a number, until you start
dealing with people like myself being lazy and typing my keyid as
9992adfc, rather than 9992ADFC).  Admittedly, there's not a *great* deal
significant that is done with it as a number, but make no mistake, it
most definitely *is* a number.

That having been said...let me say again.  This is really incredibly
minor...probably not even worth burning the electons that have already
been burned on it.
--=20
Jeff McAdams
"He who laughs last, thinks slowest." -- anonymous

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAj9/YZkACgkQXkUmzpmSrfyUrACgueXjrKclJkr/SoLV8iWS4gvR
ClYAnAo7yypXPrNo4tL9aAiZMWSP19J5
=9vni
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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