4 ms·

> not practical for big numbers Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I remember "big" was something like 20 or 30. So it's not possible to tell ages (at leas

by yiyus 7y ago

> not practical for big numbers Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I remember "big" was something like 20 or 30. So it's not possible to tell ages (at least not mine!), prices, or even the current year. That's fine, but I consider it a very serious deficiency for a language. I would find very useful to have some minimalistic international language, but if I cannot use it to buy something, ask for directions, or say the date, it's just a toy. Maybe a very nice one, I find fascinating how people can communicate with so few, but i don't feel compelled to learning it.

jan_Inkepa 7y ago
toki pona has two number systems. One is "zero, one, two, many", the other lets you specify exact whole numbers by combining together words for 1,2,5,20,100 additively. (so 63 is 20,20,20,2,1). It's yeah a bit cumbersome, but works mostly tolerably for numbers up to, I don't know, 500. So your age can definitely be specified :) (OTOH, part of the philosophy is to keep things simple - it doesn't want to assist in representing big/complicated numbers). As the numbers get big though it gets increasingly cumbersome. I once tried to generate a text represntation of an isbn number in toki pona and ran out of disk space after many GBs.... Dates are tricky though. Buying groceries is ok, buying a house probably not. As for directions, it depends on how featurefull where you live is.
- chongli 7y ago
  If you have the numbers zero, one, two, couldn’t you write ternary numbers? That would be a lot less cumbersome than an additive system. Plus it would still be fun!
  - jan_Inkepa 7y ago
    You'd still have to specify the system before you could use it, and that would probably require new syntax/grammar to be added to the language. ( Silly analogy: "C has latin character support; why can't it support Roman numerals?" )
    - chongli 7y ago
      C can be extended with your own datatypes though. You could create a Roman numeral datatype if you wanted to. You wouldn't have literals, of course, but you could initialize them using string literals. This is how arbitrary-precision numbers work in the C library GMP [1]. So the question is: can you make up new words in Toki Pona? It would seem the answer is no. This would keep the language very simple but also drastically limit your ability to express complex ideas within it. [1] https://gmplib.org https://gmplib.org
- yiyus 7y ago
  That does not sound too bad. I stand corrected. I find surprising that numbers are not represented concatenating decimal digits (just after a quick look at the dictionary, I would imagine you could say 63 as luka wan en wan tu and you could say 2042 as tu en ala en tu tu en tu, or something like that). But I guess there are still many things I can say with numbers up to 500. Thanks, with your computer project and your comments you practically convinced me of giving toki pona a try after all.

by yiyus 7y ago

jan_Inkepa 7y ago

toki pona has two number systems. One is "zero, one, two, many", the other lets you specify exact whole numbers by combining together words for 1,2,5,20,100 additively. (so 63 is 20,20,20,2,1). It's yeah a bit cumbersome, but works mostly tolerably for numbers up to, I don't know, 500. So your age can definitely be specified :) (OTOH, part of the philosophy is to keep things simple - it doesn't want to assist in representing big/complicated numbers). As the numbers get big though it gets increasingly cumbersome. I once tried to generate a text represntation of an isbn number in toki pona and ran out of disk space after many GBs.... Dates are tricky though. Buying groceries is ok, buying a house probably not. As for directions, it depends on how featurefull where you live is.

chongli 7y ago
If you have the numbers zero, one, two, couldn’t you write ternary numbers? That would be a lot less cumbersome than an additive system. Plus it would still be fun!
- jan_Inkepa 7y ago
  You'd still have to specify the system before you could use it, and that would probably require new syntax/grammar to be added to the language. ( Silly analogy: "C has latin character support; why can't it support Roman numerals?" )
  - chongli 7y ago
    C can be extended with your own datatypes though. You could create a Roman numeral datatype if you wanted to. You wouldn't have literals, of course, but you could initialize them using string literals. This is how arbitrary-precision numbers work in the C library GMP [1]. So the question is: can you make up new words in Toki Pona? It would seem the answer is no. This would keep the language very simple but also drastically limit your ability to express complex ideas within it. [1] https://gmplib.org https://gmplib.org
yiyus 7y ago
That does not sound too bad. I stand corrected. I find surprising that numbers are not represented concatenating decimal digits (just after a quick look at the dictionary, I would imagine you could say 63 as luka wan en wan tu and you could say 2042 as tu en ala en tu tu en tu, or something like that). But I guess there are still many things I can say with numbers up to 500. Thanks, with your computer project and your comments you practically convinced me of giving toki pona a try after all.