Conversation

Starting propaganda that fractions of an inch are better than cm/mm for storing small distances on computers, because inches use ratios with powers of two denominators; mapping better to binary than decimal does (0.1 precision problem etc. etc.) /j

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@nytpu I have actually had similar thoughts more than once in a less joking manner

Of course, I know better than to make software difficult for humans and easy for computers -- after, ahem, many many many open source examples...

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@jhwgh1968 I actually prefer the US customary system for things and regardless am a very strong believer in not demanding everyone change literally everything to something completely incompatible theoretically "better" (with few actual tangible benefits). But this is just counterproductive and probably not significantly better anyways versus just using integer counts of nanometers or whatever

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@nytpu yeah, in my "argument" the main thing it would be useful for is display

How do you display, e.g. 72 oz in terms of proper quarts, pints, and ounces? Bit shift. Much easier than division and modulus by 10!

... but also an operation that, aside from very tiny embedded systems or exotic applications, is not really the hot path of the code either

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@nytpu the few times i had to deal with fractions of an inch it was always thousandths of them

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@nytpu @jhwgh1968 i mean it really is just the us doing things differently at this point, and i suppose the tangible benefit doesn’t affect you as much as others (i don’t have to use a calculator in order to understamd what you are saying if the us switched to metric)

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@jhwgh1968 @nytpu yeah and ime too many things jump the gun displaying things “for humans” when they will be only read by machines. and as soon as you get to amounts that need multiple digits you’ll be back to divmod(10). If you have a hardware multiplier divmod(10) is also not too bad.

You probably also need (fixed-point-)multiplication/division to convert the values your sensors output into a human-readable value in that case. ime either the values are just meaningless gibberish otherwise or some SI/metric unit. in the case of the scales my guess is that the value is either the raw readout from the actual thing doing the sensing, or a value already converted to newtons (or millinewtons) and so to get your value in ounces out you need to divide by, seemingly, 0.278 or 278 respectively

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@charlotte well also the UK and Canada, but metric has greater cultural penetration in those places compared to here

I'll just say for my own part, I use metric at home for a number of things for the sake of my own convenience, but far from everything

-- in much the same way I use the ISO Weekly Calendar to organize my life, which basically only I use for my own reasons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date

@nytpu

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