Re: Wrong SI unit specification (& restore Ada relevance somewhat)

[The Ludwig Family <ludwigs@bellsouth.net>]

First, in reply to the comment amount German names of units, if they 
supposedly (as claimed below) do not behave like other nouns and always 
begin with a capital letter, then why does the Physikalisch-Technische 
Bundesanstalt (the German equivalent of the American National Institute 
of Standards and Technology) use the spellings Meter, Kilogramm, 
Sekunde, Ampere, Kelvin, Mol, and so on in the middle of sentences?  
(Ref. Die gesetzlichen Einheiten in Deutschland, at 
http://www.ptb.de/deutsch/onlnpub/sid/sid.pdf).

Germany has historically been rather bureaucratic.  But the EU as a 
whole seems to be even worse.  I have read that the EU was imposing 
the spelling kilometro on the Italians rather than their traditional 
chilometro, which has been used because of the lack of 'k' in the 
Italian alphabet.

Back to Ada relevance:  Ada's lack of case sensitivity forces the 
avoidance of the standard symbols so as to prevent conflict of 
things like ms, Ms, mS, and MS.  There is also the problem of the 
character � (Character'Val(181) if your reader cannot handle the 
Greek mu) for the prefix micro not being a letter for identifiers and 
the upper case Greek omega for ohm not even being in ISO 8859-1.  
Clearly, the only suitable approach is to use spelled-out names.  
The issue comes in whether we regard ourselves as ultimately writing 
Ada or English.  In English, the rule is all lower case except at 
the beginning of a sentence.  However, in Ada the typical practice 
is to write all identifiers starting upper case and the rest lower-
case.  There are no BIPM-imposed rules on the spelling of unit names, 
except for English and French.  They specify only the symbols and 
leave the spelling rules of the names to the natural orthography and 
normal practice to the language in use.  So when I write in Ada, I 
follow the typical Ada practice, not English, although I try to 
make my Ada read reasonably well like English.

Howard W. LUDWIG

Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
> Howard W. LUDWIG (howard.w.ludwig@lmco.com) wrote:
> : I would expect that a German would tend to capitalize the first letter
> : of unit names, because unit names are nouns and all nouns in German
> : begin with a capital letter.
> 
> This assumption, though plausible, is just one, and another,
> leading to the opposite conclusion, is living in a land of
> bureaucratic correctness, Germany, will give you NO
> permission to even think so :-)
> 
> : In German it is totally appropriate to start the unit names with a
> : capital letter.
> 
> No, no, it is not, at least in a technical context.
> You will hear some rather impolite remarks if you do.
> 
> Georg Bauhaus