Subject: Re: [lojban] periodic hexadecimal reminder

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 16:30:03 EDT

In a message dated 9/28/2001 2:34:31 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] 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.