Assorted spelling fixes

Frédéric Delanoy frederic.delanoy at gmail.com
Sun Feb 16 18:51:20 CST 2014


On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Henri Verbeet <hverbeet at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16 February 2014 09:57, Dmitry Timoshkov <dmitry at baikal.ru> wrote:
>> In my years of University the students were told to remember that
>> 1Kb == 1024 bytes, 1Mb == 1024Kb and size prefixes should be written
>> as a capital letter to emphasize its meaning. I'm very reluctant to
>> change this practice to something else regardless of explanations and
>> intents. I understand that for not technical people 1K == 1000, but
>> I'd assume programmers are not of that kind.
>>
> Strictly speaking the SI units are kB, etc. for 1000 bytes, and IEC
> KiB, etc. for 1024 bytes. For memory sizes, it's usually obvious
> enough from context which one is meant, so there's not much of a point
> to change it. It's more ambiguous for e.g. file or disk sizes where
> drive vendors often use 1000 based units, and transfer speeds where
> "b" usually means bits.
>
> But as I said, in most cases it's obvious enough from context, and
> "KB" instead of "Kb" isn't really much clearer.

Well, as François pointed out, b stands for bit, and not bytes.

Basically the rationale for this patch was to fix spacing (space
between number and unit name), and standardize the units abbreviations
while doing that.
k is SI, and is 1000, while K is 1024, unambiguously.
KiB and MiB could have been used instead of KB/MB, but those aren't
broadly used,
albeit standardized now, while KB is much more used than kB (which
isn't correct IMO; see above).

Frédéric



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