> No, it wasn't (or I didn't understand it that way). He'd have said encoded somewhere.

The original comment did say "encoded". The discussion about the phrase "base52 encoding" was the base of this entire thread. The parent of your original response also used the term "encoded". The context is clear. I don't see how you could have missed it. (Edit: I see you're not a native speaker. That might be part of why we're not understanding each other. Plus I apparently keep replying in between your edits, which happened again.)

> Also, your whole <pedantry> block and the paragraph above is based on misunderstanding my comment

Well, you rewrote the comment after I replied. I assumed your "source data" was your logical 0xFF number. If you were referring to the "source data" for the strings in the update description, then in all likelihood, there was never a "source" number at all. These strings were almost certainly generated via random selection from a set of characters. You could generate a very long number and then base52-encode it to produce the same thing, but it would be more work and less obvious for future code maintainers. So the "source" was a sequence of characters (azAZ), not a base2 number. You could argue that this is still somehow base-2 since it's in a computer, which I guess is fine (if pointless and pedantic), but it's still not accurate to say that these were "encoded" into base52.

I was unnecessarily snarky and rude. I'm sorry for that.

Base52 is still not really accurate. Base52 implies an encoding. Further, Base52 is not a standard so it's not even meaningful to say that the characters are from the Base52 set. You could also represent Base52 by including 0-9 and excluding Q-Z. Any string that "looks like" Base52 (azAZ) also looks like Base64 and any number of other encodings.