How often does forth use BASE <> 2/8/10/16 ?

[patricksurry]

Still occasionally toying with the idea of how small a Mini-Tali kernel could get. Supporting arbitrary bases up to 36 involves a bunch of complexity in number conversion to/from text (including division!). Limiting BASE to 2/8/16 and 10 (via BCD like http://6502.org/source/integers/hex2dec-more.htm) would simplify things a lot.

Curious if there are normal use cases for other values of BASE.

[SamCoVT]

I think that's mainly an ANS compliance issue. ANS requires bases 2-36 be supported.
I personally enjoy base 6 as it allows counting to 35 on fingers, but I haven't written any Forth that uses that. The only use I can think of might be to do base-36 encoding/decoding.