autistic plushies 🐱🎀 on Nostr: anyone know if there's a common term for what we've been thinking of as the "basis" ...

anyone know if there's a common term for what we've been thinking of as the "basis" or "scale" of fixed-point arithmetic? that being the value which you treat as one (1) in a particular context.

for instance, if your basis is 6, then you can represent a third with the literal value 2, since 2/6 is a third, or a half with the literal value 3, since 3/6 is a half. or you can represent 1.5 with 9, since that's 9/6.

(we like to pick bases that have many prime factors. like if you pick 64 then you can only exactly represent fractions of powers of 2. but if you pick something like 120 you have [a lot more things that you can divide exactly by](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number ))