On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 6:48 PM, Thomas
Gries<mail(a)tgries.de> wrote:
Was there a certain reason to chose base 36 ?
Why not recoding to base 62 and saving 3 bytes per checksum ?
I don't know, this was way, way before my time. But then, why use base
62 if you can use base 64? Encoders/decoders for that are much more
widely available. PHP's base_convert() will go up to 36, I think, so
you'd have to write a base 62 encoder/decoder yourself, but PHP has
built-in functions to deal with base 64.
Brion explained it on previous mail. And yes, we have our own converter
in MediaWiki.