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Subject: Re: [office-formula] CONVERT - why not metric prefixes everywhere?


Eike:
> First I was tempted to say "'hh'? what 'hh'?" because it never occured
> to me and is not mentioned in an Excel 2003 online-help, but then
> I looked up in Ecma and there we have "HPh or hh: Horsepower-hour" and
> "H or hp: Horsepower". However, the latter is wrong and not recognized
> by Excel, it is 'h' respectively 'HP' instead.

I don't understand.  What is exactly is wrong, and what do you think they meant?

Also, while it may be wrong for Excel 2003, it may be true for Excel 2007. (The fact that nobody believes the spec, and believes the product, shows the fundamental flaw in the Ecma spec: nobody believes that the spec is actually authoritative.)

> I just wanted to point out that an algorithm using the "parse away
> prefix" approach that (apart from the horsepowers) worked so far, when
> adding a "Pi" to its list of prefixes, will leave a "ca" only. Of course
> this can be prevented by trying a full match of known units first.

Right, that's what I expect apps to do.  I expect memory-constrained apps to try to match a prefix, and then try to match the rest to a unitname... if that fails, try to match the whole unit to a unit name.  If both fail, you have an unknown unit (which is an Error).  A non-memory-constrained app might just generate all the possible cases ahead-of-time, and do a binary lookup, for speed. Either way works.

You could treat some things as a special case, but I don't understand how OOo could do that. "m" is a metric prefix, but it's in front of mi, mi2, mi3, mph, etc.  "u" is a prefix and also begins "ui_pt" and "us_pt".

> > If one vendor chooses to not implement the complete function, it's not
> > surprising that some documents can't be supported by that vendor's
> > application.
> 
> Ok, I reword: with the restriction of not being interoperable with Excel ;-)

:-).

> > As you can see from my last post, I think the answer is "yes".  Then
> > we can support spreadsheets that use them!  I think we should permit
> > alternate spelling using "^", e.g., "m^2"... that is a much more
> > common representation out there.
> 
> Actually I've seen more m2 in the wild than m^2, IMHO most people would
> not use 42m^2 in daily writing but write 42m2 instead.

Weird. I've never seen "m2", I've always seen "m^2".  Maybe this is a European vs. American thing.  The U.S. NIST's "Guide to the SI, with a focus on usage and unit conversions" at:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/bibliography.html
always uses superscripts for powers, which works well in word processors but poorly in many other contexts.  t doesn't clearly answer the question, but since it's always superscripted, perhaps it's become common to use "^" in the U.S. Wikipedia has a redirect link from "m^2" to "Square meter", and Google finds many examples, so I'm clearly not the only one.  Is there an objection to supporting an optional "^"?

By the way, beginning January 1, 2010, the European Union Council Directive 80/181/EEC (Metric Directive) will allow the use of only metric units, and prohibit the use of any other measurements for most products sold in the European Union (EU).   I'm guessing that U.S. manufacturers will adjust their products to match.  If that caused increased metric use in the U.S. I'd be delighted.  Relating to CONVERT, this might mean that for a number of years MORE people in the U.S. would need to use CONVERT (while they change their products).

--- David A. Wheeler



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