The Greek and Roman abacus was base 10 with a zero, the numerals had no direct
mapping except by convention to their abacus.
________________________________
From: BGB <[email protected]>
To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
Sent: Sun, July 31, 2011 9:06:32 PM
Subject: Re: [fonc] HotDraw's Tool State Machine Editor
On 7/30/2011 8:32 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
By the way, a wonderful example of the "QWERTY phenomenon" is that
both the Greeks and the Romans actually did calculations with an
on-table or on-the-ground abacus that did have a zero (the term for
the small stone employed was a "calculus") but used a much older set
of conventions for writing numbers down.
>
>(One can imagine the different temperaments involved in the odd
>arrangement above -- which is very much many such odd arrangements
>around us in the world today ...)
>
>
possibly the roman numerals actually made a good deal of sense on an
abacus,
given they could be used to encode the state of said abacus?... (although
this would make more sense if only suffixes were used).
if so, I guess the difference now would be that modern people tend to have
a
different perspective WRT numbers, thinking more of linear spaces with
digit
rollover (more like an odometer or similar), hence to the modern mind the
roman-numeral system seems far less sane.
meanwhile, a few times I have idly wondered about the possibility where
everything migrated to base-16 (although preferably with non-letter
characters to replace A-F, possibly following the curve aesthetic of the
other numbers), in which case all of arithmetic could be decomposed into
bit
operations.
this being because at base-2, the rules are a bit more elegant, more like
logic ops, whereas at base 10 they are a little more arbitrary, and base-16
builds directly on the base 2 rules.
however, granted, doing this would be almost entirely impractical.
it is notable how, historically, most attempts at simplification and reform
(spelling reform; use of alternate/"simplified" alphabets and writing
systems; ...) have managed to fairly consistently go nowhere (even when
people are raised with them, they tend to revert to the prior conventions
once they start dealing with the wider world).
say, a historical example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
part of this may be because, in general, the psychological/economical/...
costs of change are much higher than those of the continued use of the old
conventions.
however, when conventions compete and one offers some clear advantages (say
arabic vs roman numerals), generally the better convention will tend to win
out given enough time.
or, at least, these are a few thoughts...
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