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

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi David,

On Wednesday, 2007-02-07 14:50:46 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> > "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?

Ecma says uppercase 'H' or lowercase 'hp' for horsepower. Both are not
accepted by Excel 2003, but lowercase 'h' and uppercase 'HP' are.

> 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 doubt they intentionally spec'd something that doesn't fit with older
releases in the sense that this argument's value can't be interpreted
anymore just because they flipped cases.. however, I currently have no
access to an Excel 2007 installation to verify.


> 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".

OOo tries to match the whole string as unit first, only if that fails it
tests for prefixes.


> > 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.

Maybe.

> 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

Thanks for the URL. Nice overall title btw, "The NIST Reference on
Constants, Units, and Uncertainty", I know they refer to the uncertainty
of measurement results, but in our context it gets a different meaning..

Other URLs, some with a more dense overview than the NIST pages:
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/SI.html
http://www.metas.ch/en/scales/index.html
http://www.simetric.co.uk/

> 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.

Probably. However, if you just "remove the superscript attribute" you
get m2 ...

> 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 "^"?

I'm fine with that if it's additional.

> 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).

<sidenote>
In fact Germany already demands since a few years that measurements of
end consumer products are to be given in metric units. No one remembers
the metric size of a 17" monitor screen or 3.5" diskette, but anyway ;-)
Btw, to complicate things, a 3.5" floppy disk never was 3.5" but 9cm
instead..
</sidenote>

  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.