On Wednesday 09 June 2010 03:34:34 pm Hans Aberg wrote: > On 9 Jun 2010, at 19:55, John H. Jenkins wrote: > > Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs. In order to separately > > encode a hexadecimal-2 separately from an decimal-2, you'd either > > have to show either that the two are, in fact, inherently different > > characters (in which case you'd better be prepared to separately > > encode the octal-2 and the duodecimal-2 et al.), or you'd have to > > two that widespread existing practice treats them as distinct or at > > least draws them distinctly. > > Mathematically, they are semantically the same. And if they look the > same, one still cannot convey that contextual information of the base. > Some numbers of different bases will be homographs, but in language, > one lets the context convey what is meant. > > The use of prefixes or suffixes to convey the base only serves to make > a context independent representation of the number. It simplifies a > traditional lexer-parser implementation of computer languages, as one > can let the lexer parse it.
"I have 20 cans." How do you convey the base from that context?
