Dan T. Abell wrote:
> 1) How is it being forced? Only someone entering, or wanting,
> the format dd.mmsssss would use the verbs Tom suggests.
If consenting adults want to use dd.mmssss format to represent angles, then it
is, indeed,
up to them.
But such representation is a bad idea which has been historically acepted
because of
hardware limitation of the era. There is no need to propagate this bad practice
and endorse it
by putting it into the standard library.
As for your argument "don't use it if you doon't like it", -- it can be applied
to justify
putting anything into standard library, no matter how bad it is. Make it a
separate package
-- and then I won't use it.
> 2) That said, your suggestion to put some effort into parsing
> an alternate format seems reasonable. Step one, then is
> deciding on a useful format for entering angles (or time).
> dd:mm:ss.sss? dd'mm''ss.ss? something akin to 1r2?
I have some base 60 parsing and conversion verbs on wiki (applicable to both
time and angles):
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/AndrewNikitin/Angular
I merely scrateched the surface there.
Representation of angles and angle combinations (like coordinates) is a can of
worms.
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