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Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But a study now shows that a kind of binary system was already in use 300 years earlier among the people of the tiny Pacific island of Mangareva in French Polynesia.
The discovery, made by analysing historical records of the now almost wholly assimilated Mangarevan culture and language and reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that some of the advantages of the binary system adduced by Leibniz might create a cognitive motivation for this system to arise spontaneously, even in a society without advanced science and technology.
...
Mangarevans combined base-10 representation with a binary system. They had number words for 1 to 10, and then for 10 multiplied by several powers of 2. The word takau (which Bender and Beller denote as K) means 10; paua (P) means 20; tataua (T) is 40; and varu (V) stands for 80. In this notation, for example, 70 is TPK and 57 is TK7.Bender and Beller show that this system retains the key arithmetical simplifications of true binary, in that you don't need to memorize lots of number facts but follow only a few simple rules, such as 2 × K = P and 2 × P = T.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday June 16 2017, @07:53PM (1 child)
Sorry, can't help you. It's irrefutable proof that assigned males are using an unnatural definition of “binary” to exclude womyn-born-womyn and minorities from tech careers. Obviously, this is a more pure form of binary than our misogynist base 2 system.
If only we hadn't conspired to prevent, with our insistence on base 10, base 8, or base 2 notations, womyn-born-womyn from writing something like this:
for (uintV_t i = 0; i < TK7; i++) {
std::cout << i << std::endl;
}
Unfortunately, being a misogynerd, I would not be able to determine more precisely exactly what a uintV_t is. It might only hold values up 1 before the value represented as 80 in our misogynist notation, but it could also be quite different in ways a misogynist like me would not be able to anticipate. I only have experience with misogynist data types such as unit8_t.
(As a side note, we misogynists of course know that doing that with a uint8_t and expecting the cout object to print numerals would require casting i to int before the insertion operator. Also of course, we know that this depends on how a uint8_t is typedefed, because we have intentionally created these complications as a means of excluding womyn-born-womyn. I'm certain that a more natural system such that these noble people in TFS used would simply know whether the programmer, being a superior and complete being such as womyn-born-womyn are, intended to output some emojis and playing card suits or numerals.)
I'm certain that c+= has always had support for the syntax above. Always. We're also still at war with Eastasia.
AC didn't believe I was serious about sarcasm, so I will omit the sarcasm tags on this attempt and try to be more serious.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday June 16 2017, @09:53PM
You should write more journals.
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