Base 3 or Balanced Ternary - actually makes a lot of sense for some things - from Dev:
The Balanced Ternary Machines of Soviet Russia
It's pretty common knowledge that computers store and operate on data using the binary number system. One of the main reasons for this can be found in the circuitry of modern computers, which are made up of billions of easily mass-producible transistors and capacitors that can together represent two states: high voltage (1) and low voltage (0).
Such a design is so ubiquitous nowadays that it's hard to imagine that computers could operate in any other way. But, in Soviet Russia during the 1950s, they did. Enter Setun, a balanced ternary computer developed in 1958 by a small team led by Nikolay Brusentsov at the Moscow State University.
A lot more at the article - go there and read if you are interested in computer hardware or programming. Their language is near and dear to my heart:
In the late 70's, Brusentsov and some of his students developed a programming language for the Setun-70 computer called the Dialog System for Structured Programming (DSSP). In my research 4, I have been able to discover that it is a stack-based language (no surprise there) similar to Forth that uses reverse Polish notation. This allows one to write programs in a relatively high-level language yet still feel "close to the metal". So close, in fact, that the authors had the following to say:
DSSP was not invented. It was found. That is why DSSP has not versions, but only extensions.
I was a big fan of Forth about 30 years ago on CP/M and DOS machines - elegant, fast and extensible. Do you want Forth to have a function that it does not already have? Write it and recompile Forth and there it is.
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