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Off topic rant: It bugs me when people mix our standard numerals with Roman numerals, such as 12MM to mean twelve million. They are different numerals and the meaning is not defined when they are used together. And Roman numerals are not like SI suffixes, meaning they are not multiplicative; Roman numerals are additive, so MM is two thousand, not one million. Also, M is an SI suffix, so 12M means twelve million and 1…
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There are words for numbers in Latin. From Wiktionary ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_cardinal_numer... ): unus, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque, sex... Just like an English speaker sees "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6" and pronounces "one, two, three, four, five, six". Sure, the Roman numerals look like letters, but that doesn't mean you pronounce them that way.
But that is very interesting, that means that when saying the numbers they were basically using something similar to Arabic numbers!
There aren’t many (if any?) human languages that duplicate this feature of being a purely positional system.
I always thought that roman numerals would be a simpler way to do basic arithmetic and might lend itself more to simple commerce. For example: III represents 3 things, so III + II = IIIII For simple commerce application that is simpler, I just have to then remember that IIIII = V, and VV = X and XXXXX = L, LL = C. Armed with just those simple rules I could probably get by in the market place in Rome. With Arabic numb…
I mean, all of the examples we used in school to learn basic arithmetic had things like "(picture of 4 apples) + (picture of 2 apples) = (picture of 6 apples)". Roman numerals are kind of a pictograph in a way.
I always thought that roman numerals would be a simpler way to do basic arithmetic and might lend itself more to simple commerce. For example: III represents 3 things, so III + II = IIIII For simple commerce application that is simpler, I just have to then remember that IIIII = V, and VV = X and XXXXX = L, LL = C. Armed with just those simple rules I could probably get by in the market place in Rome. With Arabic numb…
I'm not 100% sure, but through anecdotal experience and from what I've read (although haven't vetted), we lose track of counters at ~8 of them. That is, III is easily discernable as 3 'I's, but take IIIIIIIII, and try to recognize how many 'I's are there immediately.
I must be below average in that regard; I never have trouble being able to distinguish the number of things when there are three or fewer, but it's somewhat difficult for me to tell four and five apart, and I essentially have to resort to manually counting for five and six.
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Curious, why do you have to remember that 2 + 2 = 4 & 3 + 2 = 5? Once you know the values the symbols represent, at that point isn't it similar in simplicity to roman numerals? II + II = IIII 2 + 2 = 4 Don't see how the latter problem lends itself to any more memorization beyond symbols
Because if you don't memorize your 'primitive' algebraic rules you'll end up just doing a pullback with roman numerals in the middle. Integers don't have any values, they're mathematical objects with certain properties. Asking about 'the value of 5' doesn't make sense unless you're trying to convert to another, already known, number system. What is 2 + 5? Well 2 is II and 5 is V which is IIIII. So then we have IIIIII…
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That's because code has documented and testable semantics whereas mathematical notation is more by convention than anything. It's in between natural language and code in terms of ambiguity, but is sufficiently flexible and clear to practitioners that it remains the best way to communicate to other practitioners.
syntax, not semantics. Mathematical semantics is quite precise.
(Linguists would want to murder me for saying this, I know.)
That's why some programming languages can even be defined by implementation. (Though as a programmer I try my best to avoid these languages...)
I always thought that roman numerals would be a simpler way to do basic arithmetic and might lend itself more to simple commerce. For example: III represents 3 things, so III + II = IIIII For simple commerce application that is simpler, I just have to then remember that IIIII = V, and VV = X and XXXXX = L, LL = C. Armed with just those simple rules I could probably get by in the market place in Rome. With Arabic numb…
I remember learning Roman numerals in 1st or 2nd grade and finding them to be a lot easier for basic arithmetic. I mean, all of the examples we used in school to learn basic arithmetic had things like "(picture of 4 apples) + (picture of 2 apples) = (picture of 6 apples)". Roman numerals are kind of a pictograph in a way.
To each their own, but I'm unsure of the relative ease of roman numerals
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> In a six-fi novel I'm writing, an advanced alien civilisation uses base-12 Six-fi? Typo or genre I'm not aware of?
Haha, yeah, sci-fi. Luckily I'm not yet at the copy-editing stage ;-)
It's interesting how the notation used can encourage or retard progress. For example, Leibniz's calculus notation was vastly superior to Newton's, and calculus theory advanced much more quickly where Leibniz's notation was used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_notation
Notation is extremely important. It's basically a way to organize how you abstract a problem. If your abstraction is "bad" it will be harder to solve certain problems. It's really not much different everywhere else in society. Different programming languages/frameworks/etc. are doing essentially the same thing (if you ignore the speed of execution). All the languages are Turing complete and can do more or less the sa…