[aengvs]

>No, I represent a quarter as 25/100's to show how it would be accurately represented in metric. 1/4 meter is not pure metric, it's applying a non-metric modifuer to a metric amount. The metric representation of 1/4 meters is 25 centimeters, which is 25/100.

What? Fractions aren't exclusive to the imperial system.

1/4 of a metre is metric, just as a 1/4 of an inch is imperial.

Everything below is a perfectly legitimate way of writing metric units:

1/4 m = 6/24 m = 3/12 m = 0.25 m = 25 cm = 250 mm

So easy!

[kbenson]

Fractions are mathematical modifiers that can applied to any quantifiable measurement. That said, I imagine they aren't generally used in professional context in metric, because they generally aren't in imperial either. You don't see architectural plans that say 1-1/2 feet, they say 1'-6". Is it common to see fractional amounts in metric when used in a professional context?

[Moru]

Usually we write everything in mm for professional context.

[kbenson]

Thanks, that's what I assumed (because it makes sense). For metric you often go two orders of magnitude smaller, but I'm thinking a good amount of the reason to usually go straight to millimeters instead of also using decimeters is that decimeters just can't easily represent many common fractions of a meter (1/4, 3/4, 1/3, 2/3), and a base 10 system can never represent some of those perfectly without resorting to a mixed format.