From grey.havens@earthling.net Sat May 13 03:34:06 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 2202 invoked from network); 13 May 2000 10:34:04 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 13 May 2000 10:34:04 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO postfix1.free.fr) (212.27.32.21) by mta3 with SMTP; 13 May 2000 10:34:04 -0000 Received: from tam.n (marseille2-2-63-147.dial.proxad.net [212.27.63.147]) by postfix1.free.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3A6502811B for ; Sat, 13 May 2000 12:34:01 +0200 (MEST) Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 12:34:22 +0200 (CEST) X-Sender: elrond@tam.n To: Lojban List Subject: Endianness Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Elrond Hi, I've been lightly following the thread on endianness of dates lately, and I really must say that I am a bit puzzled about what has been said. According to me, there are both some obvious conditions under which little-endian is required, and some obvious conditions under which it is big-endian that is required. So why not giving equal value to the two forms by introducing, let's say, a cmavo prefix that would announce the endianness before a number is uttered ? (it may exist already, I don't know, I haven't read the chapter on numbers thoroughly) Anyway, such a kind of endianness announcement may not only be useful for dates, but might also be useful for other purposes: afterall it is Lojban's aim to allow for language exploration; I would not be surprised if many uses of arbitrary endianness were found, especially in human-computer interaction. Of course, such a system would require "default" endiannesses on common speech structures, but I suggest leaving the choice to lojban speakers (one could then sometimes compare the amount of "ki'a"'s in discussions among lojbanists). As a matter of fact, I have been involved in *many* IRC chats during the last three years; I can tell you that there have been several topics of discussion where big endian was used for dates, because we were then talking about tech stuff and it was far more convenient. Similarly, during my past technology courses, we have been speaking of binary registers; although these are commonly spoken of with big-endianness in the computer world, the teacher was then using little-endian for them, thinking that doing so was the standard way: the result is that while I personally got completely confused, the other students were perfectly o.k. with it. Any comments on the idea itself? co'o mi'e rafael