From LOJBAN%CUVMA.BITNET@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Sat Mar 6 22:44:41 2010 Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1992 14:43:36 GMT Reply-To: Ivan A Derzhanski Sender: Lojban list From: Ivan A Derzhanski Subject: Numeral strings: we need your help! X-To: cowan%snark.thyrsus.com%cbmvax@UUNET.UU.NET To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Fri, 24 Jan 1992 12:41:14 EST <19957.9201260553@cogsci.ed.ac.uk Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Sun Jan 26 17:47:57 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!cogsci.ed.ac.uk!iad Message-ID: I vote against {re pai} for `2 times pi'. Times dropping is just syntactic sugar adopted in traditional mathematical notation, a convention that doesn't have to hold in any other formalism, and indeed does not in any algorithmic language that I can think of. We just insert those asterisks. The argument that it is shorter isn't worth much. It is not in the spirit of Lojban to be concerned about brevity. I'd be more than happy to put a left bracket in front of `2 times pi people'. (Damned if I see why I would want to talk of them, though.) This is not to say that {re pai} shouldn't have a reasonable meaning. I think it should mean `20 plus pi', just as {re pa} means `20 plus 1'. I propose {ci ka'o vo} as the way to say `3+i4'. (I'm used to write "i" before the imaginary part anyway, so {ka'o} will translate directly to `plus i times'. Ivan