Subject: Re: lojban as a programming language [was Re: [lojban] Lojban for lay programmers]

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 16:51:39 -0500

Brook Conner wrote:

> (mathematically speaking, IEEE floating point numbers are none of these, 
> are not even a group (I don't think NaN has an additive inverse, and Inf 
> has very peculiar behavior)).

The additive inverse of NaN is NaN, I think, depending on your
definition of inverse: NaN + NaN is not 0, but 0 - NaN is definitely
NaN.

As for not being a group, if they weren't a group over the defined
IEEE operations, that would mean that something not an IEEE-float
was being delivered, which is self-contradictory, since every
bit combination has an IEEE meaning.

> Another problem of semantics is choosing the subset of the vocabulary 
> and making sure the user knows what it is. Are you going for an 
> imperative model? Lots of "ko" running around.

"ko" can be defaulted, though, if that's a convention established
between speaker and listener.

-- 
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