Jim Wilson wrote: > But if those settings don't represent a form of units--just arbitrary > values, why do they need a suffix? The suffixes were intended to > reflect units and make sense only when they mean something, like > knowing if the value is in feet or meters, degrees or radians, knots > or fps.
Well, strictly, the suffixes are there to provide context and tell the user how to interpret the value they get. Now, it happens that this corresponds closely to the physical notion of "unit". But it's not exact. In this case, interpreting the "unitless" number requires knowing the range in which it lives. A percent value of "0.5" is off by a two orders of magnitude from the same value interpreted as a fraction in the range [0:1]. Applying suffixes here to disambiguate them serves exactly teh same purpose as applying suffixes to disambiguate pounds from kilograms. Units or not? You make the call, but the design impetus is the same. Also, a pedantic note: "degrees" and "radians" are both unitless in a mathematical sense. Angles have an absolute magnitude that is invariant with scale, and thus need no units. Degrees are in fact exactly like percent -- they are a convenience representation arrived at by multiplying a unitless number by a scalar constant. Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
