meaning - What is a "numeric digit"?


I'm reading a technical documentation so every quirky detail, that a normal human being easily realizes to be a typo or just a less well chosen formulation, can, in fact, be a profound base for a concept and can fundamentally affect the future design.


In the said document I can find the term "numeric digit". What is this? Also, what is it not?


In my mind a digit is a character in the set of "0123456789", while something numeric is a a set of characters consisting of characters in the set of "0123456789" (yes, it's the same set).


Perhaps we can define the term in question by exclusion from all the other possible cases' definition. So what would be a good example of the following?



  1. a non-numeric digit

  2. a numeric non-digit

  3. a non-numeric non-digit


My guestimation is this.



  1. NST, unless we switch the base (which is too mathematical).

  2. NST, unless we declare a string of a digit (which is too programmatic).

  3. Anything sans digits (which is a superfluous tautology).



Answer



It's just a number, 0-9, as you said. Use of the word "numeric" is just to specify 0-9 as opposed to, say, your thumb.


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