[seqfan] Re: Large English integer names: Mathematica vs. num2words

[M. F. Hasler]

1) num2words has several bugs. I tried to provide fixes when I discovered
the one mentioned in oeis.org/A006969, but their "testing" suite would
reject them because the tests require the wrong result. I tried hard and
eventually gave up. (Then I submitted some of the bug reports in the
"issues" list, so maybe someone more competent fixed some of them...)

2) Peter, we can't expect to find "million, billion, trillion," and so
forth wherever it is used, at least not in the program section:
A systematic programmer would construct these names from the prefix (m, b,
tr, quadr, quint, sext, ...) and the other parts (-illi- and  -on/ -ard and
possibly -s or -en in German)
— especially when the list goes beyond the first few terms. (Cf. e.g.
oeis.org/A007208)

-M.


On Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 13:24 Peter Munn <techsubs at pearceneptune.co.uk> wrote:

> On Tue, April 25, 2023 12:13 am, Allan Wechsler wrote:
> > The point is that *none* of these words is "correct". They are so rare
> > that
> > there has been almost no social pressure to form a consensus. The "Book
> of
> > Numbers" table was an attempt to form a consensus, but its
> recommendations
> > still have lots of competition and at the moment there is no principled
> > way to select from the available options.
>
> Isn't the truth that the consensus is extremely  strongly against thinking
> about larger exponents in a skewed version of a mix of ternary and
> decimal? Who would think "instead of saying to my new colleague 'ten to
> the power sixty-five' I could say 'one hundred vigintillion' ", except
> deliberately to perplex?
>
> A widely used system of words for very big numbers will only happen, I
> conjecture, based on purely decimal exponents. Note the results of OEIS
> searches below.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Peter
>
> Search: trillion -keyword:word
> Displaying 1-10 of 66 results found.
>
> Search: quadrillion -keyword:word
> Displaying 1-1 of 1 result found.
>
> (quintillion would also get only one hit, A137411, were it not for its
> presence in the title of a Kourbatov paper)
>
> Search: decillion -keyword:word
> Search: vigintillion -keyword:word
> Search: centillion -keyword:word
>  all yield:
> Sorry, but the terms do not match anything in the table.
>
> *but* ...
>
> Search: googol -keyword:word -"little googol"
> Displaying 1-10 of 28 results found.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Seqfan Mailing list - http://list.seqfan.eu/
>