On 2 May 2013 14:31, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Strictly speaking nude values like 1.234K are not well formed. They > specify a magnitude but not a unit, kilobyte or kibibyte, kilocalorie > or kibicalorie, kilogram or kibigram, kilometer or kibimeter, etc., > etc.
To the question 'If I had integers 1234 and 4560000, what would you call it if they were formatted as "1.234K" and "4.56M"?', I was about to say "broken" or "wrong". But "nude" expresses the notation and its problem perfectly, and I recommend it with only a small :-) needed. To 'OTOH, what would be the contrasting term for "normal" notation: "1234" and "4560000"?', I would say simply "decimal", though that of course runs the risk of being taken as being in opposition to binary or hexadecimal (or any number of other less likely bases). There are two other aspects that may bear thinking about: The letters K and M are not universally understood to be either of (10**3 and 10**6) or (2**10 and 2**20). In particular, financial people and executive types to this day often use M to mean thousand, and use MM for million. Doubtless these derive from Roman numerals (though MM would be 2000), but like the Romans they are not quite dead yet, and if it really matters you should probably avoid them.* If you want names for your notations, you should consider also precision and rounding. Perhaps your program will just do what it perceives to be the sensible thing, but once you give users the choice by some keyword of 1.234K vs 1234, when should they expect 1.2340K vs 1.23K or even 1K? Tony H. * There are actually three overlapping and incompatible schemes used for money: that used by accountants and other "money men", that used by engineers and other technical people, and that used by tabloid newspapers in headlines: SI Financial Tabloid Multiplier k (kilo) M (Roman) G (grand) 10**3 M (mega) MM (Roman) M (million) 10**6 G (giga) MMM (rare) B (billion) 10**9 T (tera) - Tr (trillion) 10**12 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
