Let the surveyors decide what notation is appropriate for their field. They may well want an antiquated notation included to deal with antiquated documents. I rather like the notion of a separate category (or sub-category) for surveying.
On 06/03/2011 10:11 AM, Andrew Nikitin wrote: > 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. > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
