[Wikipedia-l] Metric v. English

Sat Jan 4 16:39:23 UTC 2003

On sab, 2003-01-04 at 07:14, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> As for the idea about special markup for measures, is there a need for
> any markup at all?  Cannot the PHP software do a reg.exp matching for
> a number of digits followed by the word "miles" or "metres", and
> automatically do the right thing?

Digits vs words (in many languages), comma vs period vs space separators
for thousands and digits, decimals vs fractions, abbreviations vs words,
in various grammatical numbers and cases, hypenation, etc. Not to
mention the precision issue.

Tell you what, you write code that does The Right Thing reliably and
I'll be happy to put it in.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)