From: Luke-Jr (luke@dashjr.org)
Date: Wed Jun 09 2010 - 15:48:32 CDT
On Wednesday 09 June 2010 03:34:34 pm Hans Aberg wrote:
> On 9 Jun 2010, at 19:55, John H. Jenkins wrote:
> > Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs. In order to separately
> > encode a hexadecimal-2 separately from an decimal-2, you'd either
> > have to show either that the two are, in fact, inherently different
> > characters (in which case you'd better be prepared to separately
> > encode the octal-2 and the duodecimal-2 et al.), or you'd have to
> > two that widespread existing practice treats them as distinct or at
> > least draws them distinctly.
>
> Mathematically, they are semantically the same. And if they look the
> same, one still cannot convey that contextual information of the base.
> Some numbers of different bases will be homographs, but in language,
> one lets the context convey what is meant.
>
> The use of prefixes or suffixes to convey the base only serves to make
> a context independent representation of the number. It simplifies a
> traditional lexer-parser implementation of computer languages, as one
> can let the lexer parse it.
"I have 20 cans." How do you convey the base from that context?
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