Message-Id: <9201272025.AA06599@relay1.UU.NET>
Date:         Mon, 27 Jan 1992 17:16:35 GMT
Reply-To: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!C.J.Fine>
Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!LOJBAN>
From: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!C.J.Fine>
Subject:      Re: Numeral strings: we need your help!
To: John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>
In-Reply-To:  <no.id>; from "Ivan A Derzhanski" at Jan 26, 92 2:43 pm
Status: RO

Ivan Answers:
>
>
> 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
>
I agree completely

                        Colin
                                        c,j,fine@bradford.ac.uk