On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 06:12:50 -0000, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Because the shorter symbols lend themselves better to the
"super-tokenization" where you don't read the individual parts but the
whole. The difference between "40" and "forty" is minimal, but the
difference between "86400" and "eighty-six thousand [and] four
hundred" is significant; the first is a single token, which you could
then instantly recognize as the number of seconds in a day (leap
seconds aside), but the second is a lengthy expression.
It's not quite that simple, sadly (for me). I have mild dyscalculia,
which in my case is another way of saying that collections of digits
*aren't* tokens to me unless I ascribe a specific meaning to them. I
don't work with day-level time differences a lot, so 86400 is just a
string of digits to me. Powers of two and one less than powers of two I
use a lot, so 65535 for example is a token. The more digits there are in
the number, the harder it is for me to take in in a way that doesn't
happen with letters. Even "forty" is better than "40" if you want me to
recall it!
--
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses
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