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by fest 1052 days ago
Even if it was all metric, in embedded systems you often have to deal with the same measurements in different units, like angles in radians, degrees, centidegrees, length in mm, m, cm, due to various reasons (mostly historical, like integer math being faster than floating point math).

It is getting less frequent in modern code bases that target 32-bit MCUs with hardware-floating point support, but converting large codebases

1 comments

> Even if it was all metric, in embedded systems you often have to deal with the same measurements in different units, like angles in radians, degrees, centidegrees, length in mm, m, cm, due to various reasons (mostly historical, like integer math being faster than floating point math).

It’s also cultural - different fields use different SI units for historical or practical reasons.

My second year at MIT I was in a program (16.001 & 2) that had different classes using cgs, mks, and mills. They all met in the same classroom (different times of course!), so there was no spacial reminder. But we all survived.