Re: [jboske] a number's magnitude

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 08:52 AM 10/14/02 -0400, bestatn@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 2002-10-14 8:11:34 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
> jboske@yahoogroups.com writes:
> And to xorxes (i think):
> > your
> > objection to it seems really to be a more general objection that
> > the overally magnitude of a number cannot be apprehended until
> > the entire number has been parsed.
>
>
> this has been one of my objections to loglan's/lojban's number system all 
> along, back before i even knew about lojban. i still don't like it. (not 
> a complaint to you; rather, thanks for pointing out so concisely what's 
> been bugging me for so long.)

Science came up with exponential notation to solve this problem, and we 
made sure to cover it. You can either do pure scientific notation, which 
uses MEX, or you can use Fortran notation, which is a string of mixed 
numbers and letters. papireci ebuma'umu = 1.23E+5 = 123000 (Lojban 
purists might use ty for tenfa instead of ebu for exponential, but the 
latter is Fortran standard. I've also seen forms of exponential notation 
that elide the plus as a default and only list a minus if one is needed.)

lojbab

--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org