Originally posted by Nucleus


How does having multiple ways of writing a number reduce it's sensibility? Perhaps it provides more flexibility?
Well I suppose in a superficial way one could say it's more flexible, but why does it need to be? My route to work is flexible, because I can make decisions based on traffic and so on: there's no earthly reason to want to write a number in more than one way. Indeed, it might make it worse, because I might write the number in one of the less obvious ways- or should I say less common- and then most people would have to puzzle over what I'm getting at and get it wrong.

Somewhere else in this thread it was asked about negative numbers. If I remember correctly, RNs had no concept of Zero, and so it's probably unlikely that they would have -ves, I think.

Last year my son, in 1st grade, got bored with his arithmetic homework and did a whole page of sums using RNs instead. He concluded it was quite a pain, because there's no 0 and no way that he could see, to carry.