Re: TEXT: (equations)

[G R A Dunbar <G.R.A.Dunbar@RGUEEE.EEE.RGU.AC.UK>]

Dylan Thurston wrote:
> {ki'e ku'i ju'ocu'i} I was referring to the principle that all typographic
> distinctions (chapter headings, for example) should be reflected in the
> phonetics.

I like it!  Victor Borge lives (pling).

>            I think this is a somewhat silly principle, anyway (for
> instance, while it's noble to try to make mathematical expressions
> speakable, it's totally infeasible for expressions of any complexity.  I
> saw a Ph.D. thesis on speaking equations for the blind recently; see
> http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/aster/demo.html)

The above www site looks like it could be interesting.

Given certain restriction I do not see any real difficulty in being
able to speak equations of any degree of complexity - assuming the
reader is sufficiently numerate (algebra-ate?!).  I presume
that before he got his computer and while he could still speak,
Stephen Hawking had to do just that.  For most people though, normal
algebraic notation is perhaps a mess because it is not sequential -
for instance because of the use of brackets.  The few complex
equations I *really* understand I don't read sequentially, but view
as pictograms.

Equations in lojban could be expressed in REVERSE POLISH notation, as
used in some Hewlett-Packard calculators and the Forth programming
language.  This does away for the need for parentheses.  For complex
equations the information would need to be "chunked", in much the
same way as over long sentences can be re-written as a number of
shorter ones.  This by the way is good Forth programming style, which
is in contrast to the multiply nested code often found in other
programming languages.

Is there anybody else out there interested in the parallels between
lojban and Forth?  Or lojban and object oriented or declarative
programming?

        Regards,
            Graeme

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|   Graeme Dunbar                                                   |
|   School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering                 |
|   The Robert Gordon University                                    |
|   Schoolhill                               Tel. +44 1224 262415   |
|   Aberdeen   AB9 1FR                       Fax  +44 1224 262444   |
|   Scotland   U.K.                 email  g.r.a.dunbar@rgu.ac.uk   |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+



Date: Fri, 12 May 1995 14:02:09 +0200