> There are other languages too that had hexadecimal and octal. > > They've been around in programming languages for decades. > > How many languages have scale factors? > > Does Fortran? Not that I know of. >
The reason why hexadecimal and octal are in general purpose languages and real numbers with SI scale factors are not is because languages are developed by computer scientists and not by scientists. I keep using SPICE and Verilog as examples of a languages that supports SI scale factors, and that is because they are the extremely rare cases where the languages were either developed or specified by end users and not by computer scientists. The reason why computer scientists tend to add hexadecimal and octal numbers to their languages and not SI scale factors is that they use hexadecimal and octal numbers, and as we have seen by this discussion, are rather unfamiliar with real numbers with SI scale factors. It is easy for them to justify adding hex because they know from personal experience that it is useful, but if you don't use widely scaled real numbers day in and day out it is hard to understand just how tedious exponential notation is and how useful it would be to use SI scale factors. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
