From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Mon Jan 20 20:20:12 1992 Return-Path: Message-Id: <9201210032.AA08886@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1992 19:29:42 -0000 Reply-To: David Cortesi Sender: Lojban list Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was cortesi@CRICKHOLLOW.INFORMIX.COM From: David Cortesi Subject: [Mark E. Shoulson: la ] X-To: lojban mailing list To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO [me] So at least: la ga'e ty moi == "that which I call T'th" [mark] > Yes, that'd work, but think about it. It really doesn't seem to be what > you want. Would you go around calling the number one "that which I call > the first"? "moi" is probably the wrong word, you'd do better with "mei", > and eve that stinks. Not at all: moi is for making a label out of an ordinal. This is what I've been trying to achieve: a label as a sumti. It does sound strange when you use a number ("that which I call 4-th" -- well, is it 4th or isn't it? perhaps it *was* fourth in an order that has since been disarranged). But if you are going to label variables with letter (strings), I think this is how you'd have to talk about those variables as variables. > The more I think about it, the more I consider that > the best route is simply "li ty". See, that's the value T, just like "li > ci" is the value 3 or "li ny" is the value N. "li" converts > letteral-strings to sumti, which is what you want here. Just as "li pa > su'i pa du li re" (1+1=2), we have "li ty .e ty du li ty" (T and T = T) (I > may be misusing .e as logical AND). Don't know about .e; Bob? But if LI is the evaluator function (lambda?) which returns the value stored under a label, or applies a function to get the value it returns, then it is the complement to the LA exercise. LA names the variable, LI names its contents. Both are required, yes?