On topic, Shannon is my favorite scientist of the last century, after von Neumann of course. If his only contribution was connecting Boolean algebra to digital logic, he would have been a pioneer. But no, he goes ahead and defines information theory out of nowhere, even though the majority of applications that can utilize it were not yet practical! I mean, come on Claude!
On a related note, I once had the weirdest bug in a C program that I couldn't figure out. It turns out that I had stylized an array of integers with preceding zeros, like: {025, 057, 112} to make it pretty. Little did I know that those zeros made the numbers octal!
So I prefer if you break up binary numbers on either 4 or 8 bit boundaries with a space and leading zeroes, as is very common in hex editors. So I'd have written either 01100100 or 0110 0100, either of which would be easier to interpret.
It feels more natural to my taste. We already use #1, #2, ...
Oh damn, that must have been tough to find!
The days of the 6-bit register or the 18 or 36 bit words are gone, dust beneath the heels of the conquering hordes of the 8008 microprocessor heirs.
I suppose we can rely on context to choose the correct interpretation, as Shannon is unlikely to have been born 294,976 years ago or 28 years in the future.
there are a number of areas of inquiry where using 1100100 is more appropriate than 01100100
and considering here it is being used to represent an age, one would have to show a spec on ages represented in binary to determine what 'standard' is