To: Lojban List <lojban@egroups.com>
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From: Elrond <grey.havens@earthling.net>
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Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 12:34:22 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [lojban] Endianness
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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


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