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Benjamin Franz scripsit: > No. _Simple arithmetic_ can be performed (wheezingly, painfully, by the > hair of your teeth) with Roman numerals. Mathematics would be impossibly > painful. And was. And in fact the Romans and their successors didn't use Roman numerals to do calculations, only to record their results. Actual calculation was performed on digital computers (and I don't mean fingers, although doubtless there was some of that, too). > The two interact and > shape each other in deep and fundamental ways. Far from being the > 'master', thought is engaged in an ongoing symbiotic dance with its tools. Hear, hear. -- "[T]he Unicode Standard does not encode John Cowan idiosyncratic, personal, novel, or private http://www.ccil.org/~cowan use characters, nor does it encode logos http://www.reutershealth.com or graphics." jcowan@r...
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