On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Ienup Sung wrote:
> Regarding the optional unit character, in particular, 'K',
> it seems people tolearate Km, km, and KM for Kilometer/kilometer.
You mean kilometre. ;)
There's just one country which does not use the normal SI spelling of
'metre' and that country does not use this unit in its road signage. ;)
> Usually though km is being used and people use a ligature for such
> characters like '' in many (Asian) cultures.
It's pretty simple really, we have a choice between following:
- the globally recognised symbol set defined by SI, which is familiar to
everyone with any level of basic scientific education
or
- Non-SI and rediscovering the lovely ambiguities that led to formal,
international, standardisation of prefixes and units in the first
place.
In many cases, I'd bet that local deviations:
a1) are made mostly for typographical reasons
a2) are mistakes made by people either uneducated in,
or forgetful of science, e.g. 'km' (kilometre) versus 'Km'
(Kelvin-metre).
b) That such deviations typically won't have any local consistency,
precisely cause they're just 'mistakes'.
> On the proposed spec which uses 'b' character to indicate radix-2 or
> radix-10, *BSD uses a flag value and based on that, the output will be
> 'k' for radix-10 and 'K' for radix-2 IIRC.
For the 2**(10*n) prefixes, the correct SI-ology is:
kibi (Ki)
mebi (Mi)
gibi (Gi)
etc.
--paulj
