Subject: hexadecimal and lojban

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 03:09:48 -0000

i admit i'm on a somewhat odd quest to convert the world to 
hexadecimal. now i see in lojban that we have words for A-F, and i 
figure we finally have a language that recognizes hexadecimal. 
there's still gismu like dekto which are tied to decimal, but gismu 
can always change much easier than the langauge itself. i'd like to 
see metric type gismu, but grouped in multiples of 2 or 4 hex 
digits. other than that, i see no reason why you can't assume that 
all numbers are hexadecimal in the langauge. english has a decimal 
amount of digits, so you assume it's decimal even though it could be 
octal. lojban has a hexadecimal amount, so i'll just assume it's 
hexadecimal. still i see value judgements against hex that are 
really annoying, like this:
"Obviously for anything other than talking about computer 
programming, the numbers 13-15 are useless, but we can use 10-12 for 
hours."
from "lojban for beginners lesson 5."
now please don't tell me dau-vai will ever be taken out. it'd be 
nice if they weren't relegated to look different than 0-9, which is a 
decimal bias, but it shouldn't be too much a problem. not enough 2-
letter cmavo to go around anyway. by the way, i continually annoy 
all sorts of newsgroups and IRC with rantings on the evils of decimal.