Re: Grammar for roman numerals

On 6 Apr 2007 00:03:58 -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:


> Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
>> Roman numerals (in their standard form without IIII and other stuff) don't
>
> fwiw, I've read that IIII was the standard form which the Romans used,
> and that IV was a later innovation.


I meant modern standard usage of.


But my point was about Roman numerals as a decimal positional system with
glyphs varying with the position. This drastically simplifies understanding
of how they are built up as well as the implementation of input / output.
Compare this with four rules as described in Webster.


Actually whether IIII and VIIII glyphs should be used for 4 and 9 is
irrelevant as long as IIII is not mixed with VI. On the contrary, other
constructs like MIM (for 1999) and IC (for 99), which were never used
otherwise than mistakenly, contradict to very positional representation.
Which makes me think that the system was positional at least in the minds
of Romans.


--
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

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