Re: Datasheet-flation?

Sometimes the people win.

It depends on the programming language used (its documentation), that of the libraries, and the company culture.

Methinks that at least reading some English is necessary.

Right.

Here a billion is still a million million.

Fine believe whatever delusions you want to believe but it doesn't change the fact that a UK billion today is one thousand million. Period.

You have still produced no no proof for your original assertion that the UK billion has been harmonised with the US billion, which was the point in question. Common misusage does not alter the facts.

Gas is not stored in Gasometers. UK pylons do not carry a current of 132,000 volts. The "Morse Code" was not invented by Morse.

...the fact that most people, including journalists at the BBC, get it wrong doesn't make it right..

Ah. If I write a script I tend to mix English and Spanish. I tend to use English thinking of sharing the script or asking questions about it. The places where I do that are English speaking mostly.

Who gets to decide "right"?

If I carry a check into a British bank and it says "one billion pounds", how much will they pay me?

These idiots want me to fill out a form, and volunteer to be spammed, to see their ad.

Some online searching revealed that the current institution for setting standards in the UK is the BSI, British Standards Institute, which is a chapter of ISO. Doing a search for bsi billion standard definition gave this (probably AI aided) summary:

Based on the provided search results, here is a concise answer to the query bsi standard billion definition:

According to the British Standards Institution (BSI), a billion has two distinct definitions:

Short scale: 1,000,000,000 (one thousand million) - This is the most commonly used definition in modern English, including American English. Long scale: 1,000,000,000,000 (one million million or one milliard) - This definition was historically used in British English, but is no longer commonly used.

The BSI does not have a specific standard for the definition of a billion, as it follows international conventions and norms. The organizations focus is on developing and publishing standards for various industries and sectors, rather than defining fundamental mathematical concepts like numbers.

In summary, the BSI does not have a unique standard definition for a billion, as it conforms to international usage and norms, which define a billion as 1,000,000,000 (one thousand million) on the short scale. [/quote]

I also found this link:

Jeff Vagg, Beckenham, UK [/quote]

After that you are on your own again, that's as far as boredom on Thanksgiving morning can take me :-).

I'm not obliged to provide you with *anything*. The fact that I informed you what a billion is today was a courtesy extended to you by my infinite patience as a decent human being.

Nothing. You'll bankrupt it. :-)

Bummer. I was planning a party.

Making a statement does not place you under any absolute obligation to back it up with facts - but a failure to do so lays you open to the suspicion that the statement was false.

Do you consider Denmark to be English speaking? Or are they only 86% English speaking?

puffer fish, Koala, several other animals with extreme diets.

Some guy wrote a c program that strips comments from c programs. His reasoning is that the code speaks for itself, and the comments are always wrong.

I assume that program was not commented.

I saw a bit of actual Windows source code, and it had a mandatory, standard comment section at the start of any block of code. It said

Gosh, how can he live with the shame?

Ridiculous.

My first job was as programmer for small company. They had tasked an external programmer with creating a software for them with LabWindows. This thing creates displays; think a virtual oscilloscope display, for instance, measuring things like temperature, pressure, rpm, etc. My boss says "I want you to add a voltage display". Simple.

Well, the original programmer had removed the header file that assigned labels to both the display windows and the code. The code would say "display_crt(31, A1)", where 31 was the element in the display to display rpm, for instance. If I inserted "voltage" in the display window, all the numbers shifted by one, so that 31 became pressure, for instance.

The programmer had sabotaged the code so that no one could touch it by replacing labels with their values.

It took me months to recreate the header file with labels. My boss thought I was useless: it is difficult to explain this to a non programmer.

I carefully documented since then every program I wrote. I did not want any other person to suffer what I did.

I also have a war story:

In the early 1980s, we had a young programmer who was not getting to done for some time. The language was plain C. She named all the variables in the pattern AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on. No comments of course. Nobody could figure out what she was doing, so I was eventually asked to figure out what was going on. So I talked to her and reverse engineered her code, generating a big flow chart in the process.

It was apparent that the approach was completely wrong, and far more complex than needed. My instinct is that she didn't know how to do whatever it did (I no longer remember), and so was playing for time, which worked until it didn't. She was reassigned. If she had asked for help, she would have been OK.

Yeah.

Joe Gwinn