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Subject: Re: [office-formula] CONVERT - why not metric prefixes everywhere?
Eike Rathke: > Ecma says uppercase 'H' or lowercase 'hp' for horsepower. Both are not > accepted by Excel 2003, but lowercase 'h' and uppercase 'HP' are. ... > 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. Hmm, good point. I think we should flip it, and make a note. Probably add a TODO to "doublecheck this" in a few weeks. Can anyone confirm or deny what Excel 2007 does? I think nobody believes the Ecma spec. > > 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. Perfect; that implements the disambiguation text I've already put in. I'd expect a typical implmentation to (1) try without prefix, (2) try with prefix. > > 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/ Thanks. The NIST pages are worth noting, though, because in the U.S. they're the closest thing to being authoritative. (NIST is the U.S. government arm responsible for weights and measures. I say "closest thing", because although they technically are authoritative, how the U.S. typically views standards is rather different than most of the rest of the world...!) > > Is there an > > objection to supporting an optional "^"? > > I'm fine with that if it's additional. Okay! We have an agreement. So _both_ "m2" and "m^2" will be okay for square meters, etc. That should serve everyone. > <sidenote> > In fact Germany already demands since a few years [ago] 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> <sidenote^2> Floppies are a particularly funny example. The 3.5" drive was said to store "1.44 megabytes", but the "mega" was neither base 10 nor the "mebi" of base 2, but a hybrid. It actually stores a 1.44 kKiB (kilo-kibibytes) capacity, that is, 1,440*1,024 bytes, or 1,474,560 bytes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte This kind of size confusion is a good rationale for supporting binary prefixes. </sidenote^2> --- David A. Wheeler
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