Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:22:34 +0000
From: Minimiscience <minimiscience@gmail.com>
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Hexadecimal numbers
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de'i li 24 pi'e 11 pi'e 2009 la'o fy. Cal Stepanian .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
> According to this part of Lojban For Beginners,
> http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less5days.html
> hexadecimal digits haven't been assigned rafsi. Is this a temporary problem,
> or is this what the designers intended?
.skamyxatra

Neither (unless your definition of "temporary" includes "until snowmen are
running GNU HURD in Hell").  As far as I can tell, they simply ran out of
{rafsi} for the hexadecimal digits, which were comparatively low on the "likely
to be used in {lujvo}" scale.  The direct {rafsi} equivalents of the hex digits
are already assigned to "{darlu}," "{fepni}," "{gacri}," "{djacu}," "{preti},"
and "{vajni}," respectively, and the available {rafsi} that can be formed by
changing the last letters of the digits are scarce and not intuitively
associated with them.

> I want to use base sixteen eventually for most everything, because it would
> be so much simpler to convert to and from binary that way

You don't need {rafsi} for that; a multi-digit number is formed by simply
listing the {cmavo} for the digits.  The {rafsi} are only needed when making
{lujvo} out of words, and I can't think of any instances in which you would
want to do that with hexadecimal digits.

mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.

-- 
lo paroi cumki cu rere'u cumki