Jochen Behrens wrote on Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:18:07 -0700...
>Don Cragun wrote:
>> Eric Lowe wrote on Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:31:31 -0500...
>>>> DESCRIPTION
>
>>>>      o An optional unit character, from the following set:
>>>>            'A' : the unit is choosen automatically for the best
>>>>                  human-readable result. The integer part of the
>>>>                  result will be between 0 and 999 when radix-10
>>>>                  is used for the conversion, or 0 to 1023 when
>>>>                  radix-2 is used for the conversion.
>>>>            'N' : use no metric unit for conversion.
>>>>            'K' : use the metric unit of kilo.
>>>>            'M' : use the metric unit of mega.
>>>>            'G' : use the metric unit of giga.
>>>>            'P' : use the metric unit of peta.
>>>>            'T' : use the metric unit of tera.
>>>>            'E' : use the metric unit of exa.
>> 
>> Shouldn't you also specify lowercase versions of these unit characters
>> to produce lowercase characters in the output?
>
>That doesn't make sense to me. Except for the 'K' case, where it should
>be the lower case to begin with, some of the lower case letters have
>different meanings in the metric (SI) system: 'm' stands for "milli" (a
>thousandth), 'p' stands stands for "pico" (a trillionth).
>'K' may be used to denote kilo in American usage, but that is not the
>case in international use. However, back when I went to school in
>Germany, I learned that 'K' is often used for kilo to denote 2^10.

OK.

>That does bring up the question whether there should be a way to specify
>the comma as the decimal marker, as it is used widely in languages other
>than English.

No.  The locale in use when this function is called determines the
radix character to be used.  If we had a ' flag character as in
*printf() format specification strings, the thousands' grouping
character from the current locale would also be used rather than always
using a comma.

If this is not what the project team intends to do, this project is not
meeting basic I18N requirements.

 - Don

>
>
>       Jochen
>

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