Johan "Stålis" Henriksson (Mahogny on IRC)
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[The Johan User's Manual]
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The Johan User's Manual
This is a small users guide in case you ever encounter me;
Written Language
If the written swedish seems funny, you have probably encountered "new-swedish". Since I rebel against about anything
that I find too badly motivated to keep, the Swedish Academy has gotten a boot as well. There are several groups
who are trying to get SA to modernize the spelling, mostly because
- Swedish could be taught at higher pace than now
- Foreigners would find it easier to adopt to swedish
- Swedish would be more competitive to english
- Dyslexia could more or less be removed as a problem
- Illiteracy in schools would be reduced
New-swedish has hence different aims than New-norwegian (which is to have a writing closer to the pronounciation).
The change is a simple mapping of spellings to a smaller domain. These are
- C and Z becomes S
- X becomes Ks
- Sj, Stj, Ch, Ti(on), Si(on), G (pron. Sj) becomes Z
- Tj, Sh, K (pron. Sh) becomes C
- ng becomes X
- G (pron. J) becomes J
- Silent letters are dropped, for example ljus becomes jus and garage becomes garaz.
- In theory, W should be mapped to V but it occurs too infrequently to be worth the effort
- Experiment has been carried out to properly use double consonants but this is a crazy amount of effort, hence dumped.
Exceptions from the rules are names of things (mainly persons) which stay the same. Note that there is no concensus
on how new-swedish should be written; originally the first two rules were addressed (mapped to Sj and Tj) but I
have decided to go all-out if I am to change it at all. My version is probably the most extreme to date.
Note that my goal is not to have a written language that is similar to spoken language; spoken language changes over
the time. There are also dialects messing up for example the use of å/o. Hence I'm only interested in consistent
spelling with written language separated from spoken language.
Mathematics
Consider the expression 3Sin(y). What stops this from being a complex number, such as inyS3? Actually, nothing, if
you are reading the ISO specs like the Devil reads the bible. There are cases when it is less obvious if () refers to
a function and when it is the priority operator (and it has happen that I've read wrong). For this reason,
I use a different notation for functions.
F(x) is replaced by Fx and F(x,y) with Fx | y.
This has the additional advantage of being faster to write.
Things like Sin2(5) is written Sin5|2. Sin52 puts the square on the 5.
Sin25 is now interpreted as Sin(Sin(5)) which is more logical and actually comes in useful, like for
markov chains or fixed point theory.
I abuse λ-calculus in my mathematical notation; a complete definition cannot be given here. However, some examples can be given.
if there is Fx | y then G=Fx implies Gy=Fx | y (the first argument to F is statically bound). Other features
include inlined functions: (λx → 2x) 5 = 2*5.
My abuse of this kind of notation is rather limited as very few outside theoretical computer science knows how to read it.
Units
I also have my own angle system, with basis 1 i.e. 1 degree=1 rotation. This replaces the 360-degree system but
not radians. The advantages are obvious.
I stick to that 1 KB means 1000 byte, and 1KiB means 1024 byte. While I might be the only one in the world doing
so, it's still ISO standard and a good one on top of it.
Material on this page is copyrighted unless otherwise stated. Ask for permission before you copy.
