Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 14:07:40 -0800, John Ames wrote:

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 21:52:24 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
 

You don’t see the difference as important?

 
Not at all! I'm just capable of inferring the correct value from context
without needing a separate unit term.

Consider those hard drives. The makers sold them with capacities measured
in MB and GB (and approaching TB, at that point). But the OSes reported
file sizes and available space in units they also called “kB”, “MB” and
“GB”, but were actually kiB, MiB and GiB.

Net result: users saw a shortfall between the amount of space they thought
they were getting, and how much was actually available for them to use. In
sum, they felt cheated by the hard drive makers. Hence the lawsuits.

Now, how would you have been “inferring the correct value from context
without needing a separate unit term” in that case?