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Re: Using standardized SI prefixes



Ben Finney wrote:
David Verhasselt <davidv@telenet.be> writes:

Perhaps transforming it into a localization problem would do the
trick.  This way, users would be able to set their preference on
byte-count in the same place as their preference on currency,
decimal, and am/pm vs 24h. Applications could make use of the
localization settings to calculate the amount of bytes, which would
hopefully eventually centralize and generalize what counting-method
the user sees.

A GiB is the same in any locale, and has the same display -- "GiB" --
in any locale. Displaying it another way is misleading.

Yes, but the fact is that there are apparently a lot of different opinions on what should be used. Therefore why not agree to disagree, and let the user decide what they want to use. Make a centralized system that converts an arbitrary byte-count to the user's preferred way of viewing it. That's where I got the locale analogy from. I know, it's probably overkill to create a whole new API for just this, but perhaps there is an API where you could add a simple function that does this to. Maybe in GTK?

Either way, a centralized system would help stop errorenous usage of GiB, GB or Gb.



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