Gregory Wood wrote:
> Sorry, I was trying to give what I thought was a somewhat more concrete
> example without having to stipulate a number of qualifications. Let me
> rephrase to be more internationally correct: "If you are storing United
> States of America state abbreviations, they will ALWAYS be 2 characters, as
> long as the U.S. Postal Service decides to stick with the current standards,
> the United States remains an autonomous state capable of determining
> internal boundaries and their designations, the programming community
> doesn't agree on another standard of naming states, you don't decide to use
> a numbering system for faster table joins, and you don't decide to make up
> your own abbreviations consisting of a number of characters other than 2."
1) You're right about the unusefulness of "politically correct" mails. A
waste of time ... unless it means sometimes missing your interlocutor's
point ...
2) However, the point made by MvO is 100% valid : an awful lot of
software is built with US specifics hardcoded : a character is 1 byte
wide, a phone number is 7+3 digits wide, the decimal separator is a dot,
a ZIP code is 2 letters and 5 digits, time is expressed with 0-11 hours
+ AM/PM, paper size is 8.5"x11" and so on ... Quite a pain to use or
translate if you happen to live in one of those backward countries where
people still live 24-hours days ...
<Venting>
As to the point of the Imperial Units System : If Anglo-Saxons are dumb
enough to let the IUS imposed on them, fine for them, but they should
not expect the rest of the world to cope up with such nonsense ...
Having to use a calculator to convert between pounds per square inch to
tons per sqare mile ... Baaah ! The IS unit is Newtons per square meter,
and all decimal powers of it.
</Venting>
Emanuel Charpentier
Decimal since 1798 (Year VII of the Republic)
--
Emmanuel Charpentier