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Re: [lojban] Chemistry

At 03:49 PM 04/27/2001 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
>I think you have it exactly right: chemical names are best expressed using
>Mex, and Mex almost certainly is robust enough to handle it.  You need to
>define operators for the various forms of chemical interaction (we'll let
>the chemists do that - there are plenty of ways to make operators).  A
>chemical formula is nothing more than a mathematical expression.
Using mex sounds good. I think that we'll need to start using some cmavo beyond 
CV and CVV for this, as cmavo space is pretty full, and most of the chemistry
operators are different from mathematical ones.
Doesn't matter. You can create new operators at will, or redefine the mathematical ones. I doubt that new cmavo will be needed, but some could be "useful" for shortening very long expressions that occur often. But I would hesitate to try to define them until people are trying to communicate more than intermittently about chemistry, because every new word that is invented is something people will need to learn to understand what you are talking about, whereas reusing old words allows people to grok by analogy. 


The atoms of mathematical expressions are numbers; those of chemical
expressions are atoms, as well as numbers. Elements have names which are
brivla; they also have symbols, which are one or two letters. Then there are
chemical groups, such as CHO and NH2 and CN, which have their own names. Any
idea how to encode all this in mex?
lerfu-strings are sumti. mo'e converts sumti to operator, so mo'e lerfu can get you any chemical symbol; mo'e la benzin or mo'e le xukrbenzine could be a benzine ring
na'u converts selbri to operators and ni'e to operands; na'u jorne therefore can give you a chemical bond if you wanted to represent bonding in mex, or you could use multiplication and addition to express chemical subscripts and compounding (mo'e cy su'i mo'e obu pi'i re = CO2, if you want something fancier than cy obu re), and some lujvo could give you special bonding types. Everything that is needed is already there and all that is really needed are some conventions (these would be needed especially to represent complex organic names of the sort that appeared earlier in this thread). 

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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