[lojban] Re: Numerical questions

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Saturday 11 October 2008 08:24:48 jozis. wrote:
> Numerical questions
>
> Author: jozis.
>
> Supposing I were to say (for example), 'li reci'. Under most circumstances,
> this would be assumed to be in base-ten, and mean twenty-three. Most of the
> time this is clearly what is meant. However, there are some cases, and the
> example I would give is memory addresses in assembly-language programming
> and such, where one might need to specify the radix. In the memory-address
> example, decimal is probably not what is meant, but it could equally be
> octal (nineteen) or hex (thirty-five). Is there some way of unambiguously
> specifying the radix in Lojban?

You use the operator {ju'u}, which is different from the other operators in 
that the left side is interpreted as me'o rather than li (so if the left side 
is a result of an operation it's not clear what that means).

> My second question is a little less crucial. Going back to base-ten, ten is
> 'li pano' and 'one hundred' is 'li panono'. By the time we get to
> 'panonono' for 'one thousand' it is getting a bit unwieldy, but fortunately
> we have 'ki'o' to help us out. 'li paki'oki'o' is not too bad for 'one
> million', but for larger numbers even this is a bit cumbersome. Am I
> missing a concise way to represent (for example) 10^15?

There's {petso}, but that's a brivla. There's a word that turns non-number 
phrases into numbers.

Pierre


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