The Sand Reckoner in Your ‘Langs

On Mon, 6 Apr 2009 16:01:40 -0400, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>
wrote:

>Alex, someone on another forum pointed out the Chinese "fourth alternative",
>but I didn't understand until I saw this:
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Large_numbers>
>. It's basically like Knuth's "-yllion" system, using successive squaring
starting
>at 10^8 and going up to 10^4096.
Aha, so it is.  Good to see a natlang precedent.

>Knuth's words for numbers are worked out up to 10^(2^100), I believe; but
>his notation for writing them aren't _fully_ worked-out beyond 10^32.
>Do you agree?
Seems that way, yes.  At least, I've seen presentations off Wikipedia that
use , ; : as demarcators the same way; but the  space ' nothing  demarcators
that
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numbers#Myriad_system
continues with seems quite suboptimal.

(Writing that I was reminded of TeX, another work of Knuth's, in which \, \:
\; are commands which insert small spaces.  Unfortunately that's the correct
ordering by increasing size of space, so they don't match up.)

Alex