From thinkit8@lycos.com Sun Jun 17 20:09:52 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: thinkit8@lycos.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_3); 18 Jun 2001 03:09:52 -0000 Received: (qmail 43966 invoked from network); 18 Jun 2001 03:09:51 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 18 Jun 2001 03:09:51 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO hn.egroups.com) (10.1.2.221) by mta1 with SMTP; 18 Jun 2001 03:09:51 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: thinkit8@lycos.com Received: from [10.1.10.100] by hn.egroups.com with NNFMP; 18 Jun 2001 03:09:51 -0000 Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 03:09:48 -0000 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: hexadecimal and lojban Message-ID: <9gjrds+cang@eGroups.com> User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Length: 1300 X-Mailer: eGroups Message Poster X-Originating-IP: 24.5.121.32 From: thinkit8@lycos.com X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 8118 i admit i'm on a somewhat odd quest to convert the world to hexadecimal. now i see in lojban that we have words for A-F, and i figure we finally have a language that recognizes hexadecimal. there's still gismu like dekto which are tied to decimal, but gismu can always change much easier than the langauge itself. i'd like to see metric type gismu, but grouped in multiples of 2 or 4 hex digits. other than that, i see no reason why you can't assume that all numbers are hexadecimal in the langauge. english has a decimal amount of digits, so you assume it's decimal even though it could be octal. lojban has a hexadecimal amount, so i'll just assume it's hexadecimal. still i see value judgements against hex that are really annoying, like this: "Obviously for anything other than talking about computer programming, the numbers 13-15 are useless, but we can use 10-12 for hours." from "lojban for beginners lesson 5." now please don't tell me dau-vai will ever be taken out. it'd be nice if they weren't relegated to look different than 0-9, which is a decimal bias, but it shouldn't be too much a problem. not enough 2- letter cmavo to go around anyway. by the way, i continually annoy all sorts of newsgroups and IRC with rantings on the evils of decimal.