Hexadecimal System
Traditional Chinese weighing units was a hexadecimal system. One jin (斤) equals sixteen liang (兩). Suanpans were commonly used in market places to perform calculations with these hexadecimal units. When all the beads in the suanpan are used, each column can be used to represent numbers between 0 and 15 (0 and F in modern hexadecimal notation). Computation in decimal and hexadecimal is quite similar except one extra bead from both the upper and lower deck are used.
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“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
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