By Raymond Gao
Are letters or numbers better? To many humans, the thought of processing and evaluating numbers and associated mathematics is very heavy, and it is an easy choice for many to prefer usable, readable, letters. For a computer, however, a file of letters can be painful to process, requiring some number based representation and other complicated systems to handle it.
Unfortunately, there are only so many letters that exist. There are twenty-six usual letters. It is possible to double this by making a distinction between upper and lower case, and it is possible to acquire more letters by using more languages. Numbers are far more numerous, since there is an infinite amount. Although numbers do achieve this infinite supply almost by cheating, all it takes is for two or more of them to be combined in certain ways to produce new numbers, a process that can cycle indefinitely. Anytime letters attempt to replicate this trick, they end up as words.
It appears that certain characters seem to have found themselves trapped between the status of number or letter. For most letters this is when they are forced into variable numbers, with the letter x always seeming to be chosen first. The character “e” is both a letter and a number, because the humans decided it would be convenient to make “e” the symbol for what is likely the second most important non-normal number after pi.
Letters can perform many more functions by themselves. While all of mathematics is locked to numbers without the help of a large number of symbols as well as letters in many cases, and so their only ability is to write positive integers or zero, letters are far more flexible. It would be painful to read without punctuation, but it would be possible to create an entire readable, meaningful text, of hundreds of pages, with letters alone. Letters are more flexible, more usable, and arguably more well designed.