Re: [HACKERS] [PATCH] Cleanup of GUC units code

Hannu Krosing escribió:
> On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 20:01 -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> > Yes there is --- it's the SI.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI#SI_writing_style
> >
> > I don't know about it being "evil" and punishment, but it's wrong.
>
> SI defines decimal-based prefixes, where k = kilo = 1000, so our current
> conf use is also wrong.

Actually, this has been a moving target. For a certain length of time,
some standards did accept that k meant 1024 "in computing context"; see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

So we're not _absolutely_ wrong here; at least not until KiB are more
widely accepted and kB more widely refused to mean 1024 bytes. The
relevant standard has been published just this year by ISO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000#Binary_prefixes

So this is new territory, whereas case-sensitivity of prefixes and unit
abbreviations has existed for decades.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support

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