Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 13:20:17 -0800, John Ames wrote:

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:54:32 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
 

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:56:27 +0100, Andreas Eder wrote:
 

It is 4KW. 4096 = 1024 * 4 = 4 * 2^10.

 
That’s 4kiW. Kibiwords, not kilowords.

 
If you care enough to bother differentiating, sure.

The whole issue was downright sloppy. And it got worse as the amounts of
storage involved got larger. For k versus ki, the difference is about 2½%;
for M versus Mi, it doubles to about 5%; for G versus Gi, it’s close to
7½%, and so on.

You don’t see the difference as important? It actually led to lawsuits
against hard drive manufacturers over what were the actual capacities of
the drives they were selling, versus what was advertised. Still think it
wasn’t important?

This is why SI introduced the binary prefixes, to differentiate the two.