Re: [office-formula] CONVERT - proposals and a new draft

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi David,

On Friday, 2007-02-09 18:31:45 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> I've had to make a number of decisions that are debatable; below are
> the main ones.  They're debatable; if you disagree with any, please
> say so, nothing here is set in stone.

May I safely assume that I can skip the remaining 8421 lines of your
previous mails regarding CONVERT I haven't read yet? ;-)

> * I propose dropping several really-obscure or
> has-too-many-different-meanings units that are in OpenOffice.org 2.1
> but not in Excel:

In general I have no problems with dropping them.

>  - Temperature measure "Reau" is extremely rare; it was supported by
>  OpenOffice.org 2.1, but there does not appear to be a need for all
>  applications to support it for interoperability. Let's drop it.

It's for Réaumur, a historical temperature scale used in Europe before
Celsius was introduced, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9aumur_scale
We could as well keep it, not?

>  - Drop mass measure pweight - if this is supposed to be the
>  pennyweight, it's got the wrong abbreviation (pennyweight is dwt),
>  and OOo 2.1 gets it wrong anyway. CONVERT_ADD(1;"pweight";"grain")
>  produces 21.88 but pennyweight should produce 24.  If it's not
>  pennyweight, I don't know what it is.

It's supposed to be pennyweight, at least from the comment in the
sources.. btw, 'dwt' would also be a deadweight ton, quite different
from a pennyweight. Yes, let's drop it.

>  - Drop mass measures hweight, shweight.  Don't know what they are,
>  and I doubt they're important.

Commented as Hundredweight and Shorthundredweight in the sources.
Yet another U.S. invention. Used in commerce, it seems, and corresponds
with 'ozm' and similar. Should use an abbreviation instead, see
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/AvoirdupoisSystemofUnits.html

Not mentioned in the online-help is 'brton', Gross Registered Ton, but
that should be 'GRT' then instead.

>  - Drop volume measures Schooner, Middy.
>  [...]

Seconded. Original developer was fond of Australian liquids it seems ;-)

>  - Drop volume measure “Glass”.  OpenOffice.org computes
>  1 Glass as 0.2 liters, i.e., =CONVERT_ADD(1;"Glass";"l") is 0.2.  Er,
>  fine, but is this really an important measure? I doubt it.  Let's
>  drop it, I doubt this is needed for interoperability.

I agree.


> Other unit names added:

> “L” - liter, because this is the standard NIST-recommended
> abbreviation for liter in U.S.  The lowercase “l”, while
> used, is easily confused with the digit “1”.

As long as we keep 'l' as well..

> “tspm” - modern/metric teaspoon, because the definition of
> “teaspoon” has changed

Is there really a metric _definition_ for teaspoon?

> “pc” - official abbreviation of parsec (CONVERT only
> supports abbreviated prefixes, so to use the correct units it must
> support abbreviated unit names as well)

Seconded.

> “ly” - light-year, a very common astronomical length
> measurement (it did not make sense to have parsec but not light-year).
> There are varying lengths of the year for light-year; the one
> recommended by the IAU is used (365.25 days)

Correspoding with 'parsec' OOo currently has 'lightyear', not in the
online-help though.

> “m/hr” and “m/sec” were added
> (“m/h” and “m/s” were already in
> OpenOffice.org 2.1), to be consistent with the “hr” and
> “sec” abbreviations.

Btw, a 'd' for day would fit into the time quantities.

> I didn't add a "modern/metric tablespoon"; in most countries it's
> 15mL, but in Australia it's officially 20mL.  Ugh.

In Australia everything is bigger and more dangerous ;-)

  Eike

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