Lojban In General

Posted by PierreAbbat on Sat 11 of Oct, 2008 12:55 GMT posts: 324

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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Posted by Minimiscience on Sat 11 of Oct, 2008 14:45 GMT posts: 3588

de'i li 11 pi'e 10 pi'e 2008 la'o fy. jozis. .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
> 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?
.skamyxatra

Use the mathematical operator "{ju'u}", which causes the left operand to be
interpreted in the base specified by the right operand (which is assumed to be
in base 10). So 023 would be "{li reci ju'u bi}," and 0x23 is "{li reci ju'u
paxa}."

> 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?

You could say "{li pano te'a pamu}" (10 to the power of 15), or you could
express it in scientific notation with "{li gei pamu}." See chapter 18 of the
Lojban Reference Grammar for more information.

mu'omi'e la'o gy. Minimiscience .gy.

--
do ganai ka'e tcidu dei gi djuno lo dukse

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