[plug] [OT] ISO and SI - was Calculator that uses commas , for thousands seperation

[Bernd Felsche]

Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au> writes:
>On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 11:29 +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:
>> Gavin Chester <gavinchester1 at hotmail.com> writes:
>> >On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 11:19 +0800, Richard Meyer wrote:

>> >> Yup, that's the European format
>> >> 123,456.78  becomes
>> >> 123 456,78  Gonna confuse the crap out of you for a few years  ;-)
>> 
>> >> Had it in South Africa since the seventies.

>> >*(SI = Systeme International d'Unites - you have to say it with a French
>> >accent ;-) for those not familiar)

>> "Nothing" to do with SI. Lots to do with ISO.
>> Ambiguity in trade (and technology) would be reduced.

>> Although it's unlikely that yoou'd want to order a steel rod with a
>> diameter of 24,000 mm in Australia; it'd be quite common in "ISO
>> countries".

>I do find date formats under ISO
>http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html

>but I see nothing available on the web from their site that doesn't cost
>money - but ISO 31 (Quantities and units) and 1000 (SI units and
>recommendations for the use of their multiples and of certain other
>units) look promising. But they deal with APPLYING SI. So it looks as
>though SI are the rules, while the ISO are the organisation that ensures
>the laws are applied by the regulations (from ISO).

ISO takes the cream off all International Standards; not just for
systems of measurement. SI (predominately) deals with (a few)
measurements and their units of measurement.

>And since the SI sites I cited gave us the thousands/decimalization
>info, I'm not too worried, especially since the ISO site
>http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/quantitiesandunits.html
>says 

>> The SI is a system of units adopted by the highest international
>> authority on units, i.e. the General Conference on Weights and
>> Measures (Conférence Général des Poids et Mesures, CGPM). It is
>> founded on older metric systems, and has been designed to be suitable
>> for use in every context - customary, technical, and scientific.

ISO and SI are distinct. ISO encompasses all of SI but goes well
beyond SI.

For ISO/IEC compliance, a comma should be used as a decimal
separator. A "decimal point" may be acceptable to some readers.

http://lhc-proj-qawg.web.cern.ch/lhc-proj-qawg/LHCQAP/isorec.pdf
But that is a problem between communication partners.

http://jtc1sc32.org/
-- 
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