Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 16:11:44 -0700
From: Chris Bogart <cbogart@CSN.ORG>
Subject: Re: replies re. ka & mamta be ma
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
To: Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Reply-to: Chris Bogart <cbogart@CSN.ORG>
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>> > Suppose you had to
>> > devise a notation for all numbers. [...] One symbol alone will
>> > not suffice. I guess some mathematician has worked out how few will
>> > suffice.
>> Two. It's called binary notation ;)
>
>Wdn't that just do positive integers?
 
You could put a 0 or 1 at the beginning and by convention let it mean
positive or negative.  More generally, you could come up with an encoding
for all rational numbers using, say the ASCII character set (the irrationals
can't be represented with a finite string), then convert the resulting
string into binary.  But then the 0s and 1s really would be more like
"subsymbols" than "symbols", wouldn't they?  Determining how many symbols
you'd need would depend on how you defined a symbol.
 
(for that matter, you could convert the ascii representation into a single
very large number, and put that many 1's in a row, presumably then
representing any rational number with a string of 1's -- one symbol only!)
 
                     ____
 Chris Bogart        \  /  ftp://ftp.csn.org/cbogart/html/homepage.html
 Quetzal Consulting   \/   cbogart@quetzal.com