Re: [lojban] periodic hexadecimal reminder

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 9/28/2001 2:34:31 PM Central Daylight Time, jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU writes:

To me it seems rather inelegant that a language feature fails to function
in the absence of a default radix.  For example, if you were a rabid
dozenal fanatic (or hex :-), would you want to be forced to specify the
radix of your own favorite number system in that depraved base X (ten)?
Or, stretching the point rather more than seems justified, perhaps if you
were a heptapus you could not manage base ten, and it's nasty and dumb to
shut the heptapi out of the Lojban world just over the radix.

xod, too:
<10 is the default earth human base, and the one shared by the six cultures
that contributed gismu! No other apology is needed. The "cultulrally
neutral" (retarded) solution is to issue the base number in base one.>


The situation of heptapodes reminds us, as xod does again, that the choice of the default base is out of our hands (snrk!).  Rationality has no power against 10 (or more) millennia of counting on fingers (yes, I know about binary counts, but people don't count that way).  The fingerless three base, the shorthanded four base and the two handed eight base have all passed away, along with the scholarly 12 and 60 and 13 and 20 and 18 and Lord knows what else.  All downed by the digits.  so we offer the possibility of using others, but we do so in the context of human reality.  As for (yuck, ptui) hex, the very computers which are its main source of appeal make it it unnecessary, since they convert any system into any other system with such great ease.