Adam Borowski: ... > The latter have weird customs like a medieval system of measurements, units > that differ on dry-vs-liquid-vs-slightly-moist, or different distances by > the same name on air vs land vs survey measurements.
Just go back 50-60years and you'll find that we used a lots of different "thumb" and other units here also. And it's usage is still lingering although diminishing. Sometimes it is used as an indication of a person who "knows" his trade, like 5" nail instead of 125mm nail. And regarding your last comment, here in Sweden we still use mil (=10km) and distansminut (=1852m, nautical mile) as a complement to the boring km. Doesn't the airplane etc. people all arond the globe talk about flying heights in feet. And annoyingly many persons excels in using mils (=1/1000 inch) instead of mm in the pcb industry even though components with pitch derived from inch grids are quickly becoming obsolete. Yea, thoose "medieval" units still has a somewhat strong hold on us all. ... > And, also, a discontinuous system of time with four non-monotonic segments > and ambiguous endpoints; marked with "am" and "pm". ... Isn't it so that all (?) analogue clocks show 0-12 and you must infer the "am" and "pm" part from context. And in informal situations you (at least here) say five a'clock, not 17:00. The difference is we use a 24h clock in formal situations or when we want to be more specific. /// Upstream date (coreutils) has got a debug flag that might be useful: $ LC_TIME=sv_SE ./date --debug ./date: output format: ?%a %e %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z? tis 30 mar 2021 18:39:34 UTC $ LC_TIME=en_US ./date --debug ./date: output format: ?%a %d %b %Y %r %Z? Tue 30 Mar 2021 06:39:38 PM UTC Regards, /Karl Hammar _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
