Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages

[Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

> From: rantingrick <rantingr... at gmail.com>
> Anyone with half a brain understands the metric system is far
> superior (on many levels) then any of the other units of
> measurement.

Anyone with a *whole* brain can see that you are mistaken. The
current "metric" system has two serious flaws:

It's based on powers of ten rather than powers of two, creating a
disconnect between our communication with computers (in decimal)
and how computers deal with numbers internally (in binary). Hence
the confusion newbies have as to why if you type into the REP loop
 (+ 1.1 2.2 3.3)
you get out
 6.6000004

The fundamental units are absurd national history artifacts such as
the French "metre" stick when maintained at a particular
temperature, and the Grenwich Observatory "second" as 1/(24*60*60)
of the time it took the Earth to rotate once relative to a
line-of-sight to the Sun under some circumstance long ago.

And now these have been more precisely defined as *exactly* some
inscrutable multiples of the wavelength and time-period of some
particular emission from some particular isotope under certain
particular conditions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Standard_wavelength_of_krypton-86_emission
 (that direct definition replaced by the following:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Speed_of_light
"The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum
 during a time interval of ^1/[299,792,458] of a second."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Modern_measurements
"the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to
 the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of
 the caesium-133 atom"
Exercise to the reader: Combine those nine-decimal-digit and
ten-decimal-digit numbers appropriately to express exactly how many
wavelengths of the hyperfine transition equals one meter.
Hint: You either multiply or divide, hence if you just guess you
have one chance out of 3 of being correct.