|
Posted by Jürgen Exner on June 1, 2008, 11:16 pm
Please log in for more thread options
>I agree in principle that code that deals with human measurement units
>should *at least* be aware of the fact that there are different
>measurement systems. As a general rule, I would defer to your wider
>experience
Wow, I feel flattered.
> (I infer from your name that you're European, so you're
>probably a little more exposed to issues of internationalisation than US
>developers)
Indeed. And I have been teaching US developers for years that it is a
very bad idea to just append an 's' to a word if you want to create the
plural of that word. Among many other things.
>However, in the particular case of temperature and weather, there really
>are only two measurement systems: Fahrenheit and Celcius (or Centigrade,
Now that is one of my pet peeves! A centigrade by definition of the
prefix centi is one hundreds of a grade or degree. So 36 degrees
centigrade are 0.36 degrees, but in what system?
Even the combination 130 centigrade Fahrenheit makes total sense and
would be 1.3 degree Fahrenheit. Very likely not what the person using
centigrade had in mind.
>if you prefer). Since a pragmatic script that is internationalized would
>allow the user to choose their unit of choice for display, it's academic
>which system is used inside the Perl script... this could be easily
>hidden from the calling script by a wrapper function performing the
>necessary conversions.
>
>Heck, you could store the temperatures in Kelvin, the true SI unit for
>temperature and convert to C or F as required by the calling function :o)
Not a bad idea at all.
Except that all scientific use including any weather reporting station
even in the US(!) uses Celsius, see e.g. aviation weather reports and
forecasts. Therefore degree Celsius appears to be the most convenient
unit for interal storage where you would need the least number of
conversions.
jue
| 
XML Sitemap