Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Pascal Bourguignon]

rpw3 at rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) writes:

> Andrew Dalke <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:
> +---------------
> | (and yes, I know about the lawsuit against disk drive manufacturors
> | and their strange definition of "gigabyte"... )
> +---------------
> 
> Oh, you mean the fact that they use the *STANDARD* international
> scientific/engineering notation for powers of 10 instead of the
> broken, never-quite-right-except-in-a-few-cases pseudo-binary
> powers of 10?!?!? 


No  we mean  the  fact  that they  subreptitiously  switched from  the
industry standard of defining giga  as 2^30 to the scientific standard
of defining  giga as 10^9, which  allowed them to  display bigger size
while in fact  they did not have bigger hard drives.   That was a pure
marketing trick.   Happily, after these  lawsuits, they now  write the
exact number of  byte storable on their devices.   But be assured that
they would have never switched if 2^30 had been smaller than 10^9.


> [Hmmm... Guess you can tell which side of *that*
> debate I'm on, eh?]  The "when I write powers of 10 which are 3*N
> just *asssume* that I meant powers of 2 which are 10*N" hack simply
> fails to work correctly when *some* of the "powers of 10" are *really*
> powers of 10. It also fails to work correctly with things that aren't
> instrinsically quantized in powers of 2 at all.
> 
> Examples: I've had to grab people by the scruff of the neck and push
> their faces into the applicable reference texts before they believe me
> when I say that gigabit Ethernet really, really *is* 1000000000.0 bits
> per second [peak payload, not encoded rate], not 1073741824, and that
> 64 kb/s DS0 telephone circuits really *are* 64,000.0 bits/sec, not 65536.
> [And, yes, 56 kb/s circuits are 56000 bits/sec, not 57344.]

Yes,  that's  because  telecoms  are  not  computers.  In  particular,
telecoms were  invented long before  computers and binary  base became
interesting.

On the other hand, hard drives are purely computer stuff...
 

> Solution: *Always* use the internationally-recognized binary prefixes
> <URL:http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html> when that's really
> what you mean, and leave the old scientific/engineering notation alone,
> as pure powers of 10. [Note: The historical notes on that page are well
> worth reading.]

Perhaps we  should start serriously to  use the kibi  (Ki), mibi (Mi),
gibi (Gi), tibi (Ti), etc, that have been proposed.


-- 
__Pascal_Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/
Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in reality.