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Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

How can I make sure a screen reader reads "In Hamlet, Act Ⅳ, Scene Ⅸ..." correctly?

Easy: By writing "In Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 9..." instead.

There simply is no reason to use relics of cultures that fell before long before the invention of the printing press in a modern context such as a TTS based screen reading software, if said relics interfere with such systems functionality.

This goes double for instances where such relics have multiple representations, that make the problem unnecessarily harder than it already is. Roman Numerals are one such instance, because we can write IV or Ⅳ.

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You have a TARDIS to go back and tell Shakespeare this, do you?

No I don't.

And neither does Mr. Shakespeare.

And because he doesn't, the decision how his works are represented in modern systems, is not up to him.

So Shakespares works should be edited to acommodate a software bug?

Anything written before about 1755 gets heavily edited for modern readers because the old (and sometimes also inconsistent) spelling is a bit too painful. (I think Shakespeare's First Folio didn't distinguish between the letters U and V. Does adding that distinction count as an edit?)

Also, according to online images, the First Folio had "Actus Primus. Scoena Prima." rather than "Act I Scene I"!

Yes they exist in numerous editions more or less edited and modernized. While some might like a modernized version, some might prefer or need access to the original text - e.g. the editors creating modernized versions!

And they are welcome to do so.

Same as I are welcome to decide if supporting something that makes up a tiny tiny fraction of all written text in my software is worth the extra time and effort to build and maintain it, or not.

How is replacing one system of writing numbers with another system of writing numbers, with the exact same numbers represented, editing the works?

Btw. is it also a bug if a screenreader doesn't support Babylonian Cuneiform Numerals? They have Unicode Code points as well.

Yes that is editing. Modifying a text (whether small or large changes) is called editing.

I have no opinion on Cuneiform.

Editing, to me, is changing the content of the text.

Using another font, using a different way to represent numerals, or using bold text, isn't editing, it's formatting and styling. When my webbrowser renders markdown to html, it's not editing the text, its reformatting it.

Adding emphasis in a text is also editing, even though the letters are the same.

To be fair, both number systems predate the printing press by quite a bit.

True, but one continues to be used long after it's invention, and the other was dropped from almost every single one of its original use-cases, because it sucks as a system to write numbers; It's hard to sort, it's hard to read/parse, it's a sign-value notation system making it suck for large numbers, its similarity to letters of the alphabet adds to the possible footguns, there is no zero, and it has no concept of values smaller than 1.

The Romans did actually have a simple dozenal fraction system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions

Well, yes. But its a duodecimal system that incorporates uncial dots. E.g. 9/12 is written as S···

That ellipsis looking thing will be fun for screen readers.

I'd argue it's been dropped from the places where the other system has clear advantages.

Very true.

But the question I now have to ask is: What tangible advantages do roman numerals confer in the spaces where they are still kept around.

I'm curious if anyone has any answer beyond "flavor," which is a valid reason to do something, but is worth being explicit about.

They have stylistic and contextual advantages.

Roman numerals carry the connotation of the numbers belonging to a title, the same way Writing Something Like This does. Except you can't do that with arabic numerals. They're all case-less.

It's essentially a way of capitalizing numbers not entirely dissimilar to how Roman script in general is used as a way of capitalizing the English alphabet.

"Roman numerals carry the connotation of the numbers belonging to a title"

Okay.

    I. Weigh 500g of flour into a mixing bowl
    II. Add one egg
    III. Pour 2 cups of milk into the bowl
    IV. Mix until you have a runny dough

So what title does that belong to? What title does MCMXCIX belong to? None, because they are not in the context of a title. Same as how I learned to stop worrying and love Linux doesn't belong to a title unless it's in the context of a title:

    How I stopped worrying and love Linux - An Essay

So if context is the deciding factor for something belonging to a title, what role does numeric notation play in there? Is

    9 surprising ways how powershell can help my workflow

any less a title than if I had used `IX` instead of `9`?

> It's essentially a way of capitalizing numbers

Okay, so how do I capitalize, say, 175,000,000,000 using roman numerals if I want to, eg. write the title of article about how many params GPT-3 has? A way of capitalizing numbers, that suddenly stops being useful when numbers are large, isn't a very good way in my opinion.

I mean title in the sense of the name of a work or entity. Like the title of a book.

In your example,

    I. Weigh 500g of flour into a mixing bowl
    II. Add one egg
    III. Pour 2 cups of milk into the bowl
    IV. Mix until you have a runny dough

the roman numerals stand to distinguish the ordinals from the instructions. To illustrate the problem, let's turn everything into arabic numerals.

    1. Weigh 500g of flour into a mixing bowl
    2. Add 1 egg
    3. Pour 2 cups of milk into the bowl
    4. Mix until you have a runny dough

This is strictly harder to parse. Using Roman numerals means you don't have to wonder whether it's III cups of milk or 2 from a glance because nobody would write the former.

> Okay, so how do I capitalize, say, 175,000,000,000 using roman numerals if I want to, eg. write the title of article about how many params GPT-3 has? A way of capitalizing numbers, that suddenly stops being useful when numbers are large, isn't a very good way in my opinion.

Right, in which context would you capitalize the number 175,000,000,000? It's not really part of a name. If the model was called GPT-175,000,000,000, then I'd see why you'd consider writing it in roman numerals, but it isn't.

Within e.g. the title of a article, roman numerals allows you to further capitalize a number.

Like you could write "Doom II Ships On Four Floppy Disks". This makes it clearer that the II is part of the name.

> I mean title in the sense of the name of a work or entity.

"Henry the 8th" or "Henry the 8." conveys exactly the same information as "Henry VIII". The context makes it clear that the numeral is part of a designation. The same is true for "Star Wars Episode 4", "Act 2 Scene 5", "Harry Potter 2" or any other use of a title.

The difference is: 8 is trivially easy to parse. With "VIII", software has to accomodate people writing it in unicode and people writing it in latin letters, plus the parser needs to handle the subtraction logic, otherwise "Henry IV" will be sad, and as a human, depending on the font used, I may have to look twice whether there are 2 I's or 3.

> This is strictly harder to parse.

What? How is this harder to parse? The dot after the numbers makes it increadibly clear that this is a list item. You know what CAN be hard to parse at a glance? The difference between "III" and "II".

> roman numerals allows you to further capitalize a number.

No they don't because there is no such thing as a "capitalized number".

If I want to make a number stand out visually, I have multiple choices that don't require using an antique way of writing numerals: I can use <b>, <u>, <i>, change the font, font size or even color my numbers.

> This makes it clearer that the II is part of the name.

"Doom 2 ships on 4 floppy disks" is just as clear. As with the examples above, the context determines what is part of a title, and what isn't.

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