[Python-ideas] real numbers with SI scale factors

[Ken Kundert]

> There are other languages too that had hexadecimal and octal.
> 
> They've been around in programming languages for decades.
> 
> How many languages have scale factors?
> 
> Does Fortran? Not that I know of.
> 

The reason why hexadecimal and octal are in general purpose languages and real
numbers with SI scale factors are not is because languages are developed by
computer scientists and not by scientists. I keep using SPICE and Verilog as
examples of a languages that supports SI scale factors, and that is because they
are the extremely rare cases where the languages were either developed or
specified by end users and not by computer scientists.

The reason why computer scientists tend to add hexadecimal and octal numbers to
their languages and not SI scale factors is that they use hexadecimal and octal
numbers, and as we have seen by this discussion, are rather unfamiliar with real
numbers with SI scale factors. It is easy for them to justify adding hex because
they know from personal experience that it is useful, but if you don't use
widely scaled real numbers day in and day out it is hard to understand just how
tedious exponential notation is and how useful it would be to use SI scale
factors.