Re: Fwd: Re: [office-formula] Straw poll - slug (and lightyear)

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <andreas.guelzow@concordia.ab.ca>]

On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 14:09 -0600, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Rob said, regarding light-year:
> > That matches the International Astronomical Union's definition as well, 
> > only they say as distance light travels in a vacuum in 1 Julian Year, 
> > which is 365.25 days.

> Anyway, I think we should be as accurate as possible on the conversion function.
> It's an easy function to get 'slightly wrong' without anyone noticing for a while,
> and that would be bad.
> 

I thin kit is important that we keep the purpose in mind and so have
definitions that are useful.

If we say a light-year is the "distance light travels in a vacuum in 1
Julian Year, which is 365.25 days" then this may be very correct but
also very useless. Implementors will still need to decide what that
value really is (or at least which value to use).

On the other hand if we have exact conversion factors in the OpenFormula
standard to convert all those distance units into meters, then the
conversion between any two distance units becomes obvious. 

Andreas