On 7/28/2010 9:33 PM, karl williamson wrote:
The digits (一、 二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、〇) are used both
as letters and as decimal place-value digits, and they are scattered
widely....the same characters are also used as elements in a system
that doesn't use place-value, but uses special characters to show
powers of 10.
Is it the case that a sequence of just these characters, without any
intervening characters, and not adjacent to the special characters you
mention always mean a place-value decimal number?
No, these characters are also letters. So single character sequences
cannot be taken as numeric, unless you have information from context.
If you know that the string is a number, but don't know the format,
then, I believe, the absence of the characters for 10, 100, etc. would
indeed imply that the notation is place-value.
A./
