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From: | Gubinelli Massimiliano |
Subject: | [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs name |
Date: | Wed, 9 Dec 2009 00:44:06 +0100 |
Dear all, I would like to revive once more the debate on the name for the TeXmacs program. There are many reasons for believing that the current name does not serve very well the popularity of the program. I've just come across to another possibility (among many other already proposed and lost somewhere in the internet): Quipu (or kipu, or khipu) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu ). Apparently this is the ancient way Maya had to keep various kind of informations and seems to mean "knot" so there is some link with mathematics and with structured information. The images of Quipus make me think to trees (of TeXmacs tags). Here en excerpt of the wikipedia page (nice and worth reading) " Most of the information recorded on the quipus consists of numbers in a decimal system;[1] see The encoding system below. Some of the knots, as well as other features such as color, are thought to represent non-numeric information, which has not been deciphered. It is generally thought that the system did not include phonetic symbols analogous to letters of the alphabet. However Gary Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system which could record phonological or logographicdata. " Best, Massimiliano |
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