On 2012-12-18 17:49, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
IMHO it would make sense to use the [[International System of Units]] for
internal storage. It is not consequently used in other realms, not even in
the German spoken countries (PS vs. kW for cars). Maybe it would be possible
to use small scripts (such as WP-templates) to transcalc values, which can
easily be developed by the community.
Internally we would translate it, yes, otherwise the numbers would not be
comparable. But for editing we need to keep the unit of the source / of the
editor, or else we will loose precision.
I propose to use a system which allow to store an SI prefix
separatedly from the number and unit.
Else we would have to express the proton (proton is about 1.6–1.7 fm)
as 0.0000000000000016-0.0000000000000017 m and a fungus (2.8 km) as
2800 m. Especially the small values would be very error prone.
Allowing fixed order-of-magnitude prefixes would ease both error
control and presentation.
(ASIDE: Regarding presentation: it is not always algorthmically eay
whether to present 0.00000000000001 m as 1 * 10e-14 or a 10 fm = 10 *
10-15. In a scientific context, only the SI steps should be used, in
another context the closest decimal may be appropriate.)
But floating point numbers are handled by the implementation of [[IEEE
floating-point standard]].
Displaying the numbers is another question. There I have to agree that
it always makes sense to also store a typical used unit for that type of
data.
Distances for towns are usually displayed in km the High of mountains is
displayd in metres if we're talking of the metric system. So I assume
that this is user or language preference also called locale-set.
Cheers
Marco
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