>
> > Even in English we have, in many dialects, "five hundreds of
> > dollars" (as opposed to "five hundred dollars") not to mention
> > "threescore dollars and twelve". I believe my grandfather wrote
> > "Seventy-Five Pounds and 26/100", but "Seventy-Five Pounds Only";
> > yet "One Hundred Pounds Exactly".
>
> Bear in mind here that we don't need to be able to parse all of the
> possible valid constructions in a given language, we just need to be
> able to output *one* valid construction for each language, which is a
> much simpler problem.
Yes, parsing is harder than determinstic generation.
But:
Some constructions are allowable in English (but not mandatory).
Such constructions are within the gamut of the language center
of the human brain. Virtually any natural-language syntactic
construction that can be processed by the human brain turns out
to be mandatory in some language, somewhere. Indeed, given the thousands
of languages of astonishing variability that exist, it would be
astonishing if this were not so.
So chances are that some language or culture, somewhere, will require
a construction like this. If our formalism for describing number
notations can handle it, people will be able to do their own
linguistic customization. (and contribute the results to our
internationalization library, natch).
Whether we want to do all this now, instead of just letting everyone
program their own number code in Scheme, is another matter, or course.
But Stephen's ad-hoc notation may indicate regularities that could simplify
our code in the long run.
>
> --
> Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930
>
-- hendrik.
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