Hacker News Reader

> eventually mastered an entirely new digit system (where ⌊ stood for 2, ⌈ for 8, etc.)

Why invent a specialized number system? How difficult would it have been to teach him Chinese numerals for example.

Also very curious on his perception of Roman numerals.

Brilliant. Roman numerals are, after all, just letters. The "why haven't they used them?" becomes pretty jarring once you think about it.

Roman numerals are a lot harder to do arithmetic with.

True. Maybe that's the reason why they chose that new system.

Roman numerals are not a place-value system and you can’t make a computer use Roman numerals just by switching to a custom font.

OpenType font shaping is shockingly powerful ([e.g.](https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere...), so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't made a Roman numeral font already.

Heh, I knew I should have said something about OpenType shenanigans :)