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by tomxor
2545 days ago
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> and there aren't even proposals to change, and why should we? becaaause.. it's intermediate scales are un-prefixable, because it names adjacent intermediate orders of magnitude with only subtle mutations of the previous name, because it's inconsistent with itself (<x 10^9), and finally because in 2019 it's extremely ambiguous, in all languages SI prefixes have been around since 1960 all of science and engineering uses these. In other words the same reason English abandoned the long scale. Then again it was probably far easier for Britain to change in 1974 than it is for the remaining long scale countries to change today since the discrepancy will have been built into all software and systems dealing with currency and other things between countries since then... So i guess you are probably stuck with it and all it's disadvantages whether you are aware of them or not. |
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huh? Mrd, Brd, Trd, ...
> it names adjacent intermediate orders of magnitude with only subtle mutations of the previous name
million and ten million are also rather close. So what?
> it's inconsistent with itself (<x 10^9)
Those are explicitly named for historical reasons, which is well in line with how names for numbers are handled: we generally work in a decimal system, yet have "eleven" and "twelve", followed by lastdigit-teen while everything above twenty is decimaldigit-y-lastdigit. (German has similar quirks, although the order remains the same. Still: neunzehn, nine-ten vs. neunundzwanzig, nine-and-twenty).
And let's not start with French (ten, twenty, thirty, fourty, fifty, sixty, sixty-ten, four-twenties, four-twenties-ten, hundred). [to be fair, Switzerland and Belgium fixed that in their dialects, using septante, huitante, nonante]
> in 2019 it's extremely ambiguous
It was ambiguous since the 17th century when the short scale was invented.
I'm not sure if the UK officially switched by now, all I see is a random statement by a Prime Minister 45 years ago that I'm not sure is normative (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1...)
> in all languages SI prefixes have been around since 1960
Sure, and it's used sometimes, but are SI prefixes defined as normative numbering scheme anywhere? That is, which language and which country uses Gigagrams officially?