Converting BaseForm Result into a Usable Integer for Computation

Questions
,
1

I am trying to do the following:

theMin = BaseForm[16^^1000,10]
theMax = BaseForm[16^^10000,10]
N[20*Log10[theMax/theMin]]

However this results in an error because Head[theMin] is BaseForm. How can I convert “theMin” and “theMax” from the “display BaseForm” formats into an integer format that can be used for computation?

What I want to get is the following

N[20*Log10[65536/4096]]
24.0824
2

Actually this worked…

theMin2 = FromDigits["1000",16]
theMax2 = FromDigits["10000",16]
N[20*Log10[theMax2/theMin2]]

24.0824

It would be nice if it were possible to wrap a built-in function around BaseForm to be able to reuse the BaseForm variables in other calculations

3

This question comes up with TableForm and MatrixForm a lot. The solution is to do the assignment inside the *Form function.

In[1]:= BaseForm[theMin = 16^^1000, 10]
Out[1]//BaseForm= 
            4096

In[2]:= theMin
Out[2]= 4096

In[3]:= Head[theMin]
Out[3]= Integer

Usually, the content of the *Form wrapper can be extracted with First.

In[5]:= aMin = BaseForm[16^^1000, 10]
Out[5]//BaseForm=
            4096

In[6]:= First[aMin]
Out[6]= 4096
4

Unwrap before numericizing:

In[93]:= 20*Log10[theMax/theMin] /. BaseForm[x_, _] -> x // N

Out[93]= 24.0824
5

What are you really trying to do, anyway? Why use BaseForm to display base 10, when base 10 is the default?

6

Bruce, thanks that is great - I did not know you could do the assignment inside the Form function. It would be nice if Mathematica added a parameter/property to the built-in Head function that allowed the user to specify the desired format for a variable and then the return value of the Head function could be a list of recommended options (or function paths) to get to that result. I know that sounds like a complicated (and crazy) request but it would be a slick option.

@John, thanks for providing the alternative unwrap method as well.