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From: Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 17:19:24 -0500
Subject: [lojban] Re: fi'u was Re:lanzu usage
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At 09:30 AM 3/26/04 -0800, Jorge "Llambías" wrote:

>--- Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
> > At 09:53 AM 3/25/04 -0800, Jorge "Llambías" wrote:
> > >Letters as digits don't make much sense anyway.
> > >They are certainly not worth the trouble in boi's that they
> > >cost us.
> >
> > Tell it to the people who came up with the idea of using letters for hex
> > digits.  Lojban has cmavo for the 6 hex digits, but for higher bases, it
> > seems that history has indicated the use of lerfu as the convention.
>
>But Lojban can't handle higher bases that way! Every number
>must start with a member of PA, so letters can only be used
>for other-than-the-first digit.

For operands, and therefore in most of MEX, lerfu strings and quantifiers 
are interchangeable.  I'll admit to not thinking about using odd bases as 
quantifiers on sumti (or maybe I did and Cowan took it out when he 
redesigned MEX - can't remember and it doesn't much matter now since it's 
been this way at least a dozen years), so using a lerfu initial quantifier 
requires  "vei" preceding (vei is optional with pure PA numbers), but is 
still usable.

I never considered the use of boi to be that problematical, especially 
since it can be required sometimes even with pure numbers (JCB's classic 
example was "five 55-gallon drums").

lojbab

-- 
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org


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