Even if it was all metric, in embedded systems you often have to deal with the same measurements in different units, like angles in radians, degrees, centidegrees, length in mm, m, cm, due to various reasons (mostly historical, like integer math being faster than floating point math).
It is getting less frequent in modern code bases that target 32-bit MCUs with hardware-floating point support, but converting large codebases
> Even if it was all metric, in embedded systems you often have to deal with the same measurements in different units, like angles in radians, degrees, centidegrees, length in mm, m, cm, due to various reasons (mostly historical, like integer math being faster than floating point math).
It’s also cultural - different fields use different SI units for historical or practical reasons.
My second year at MIT I was in a program (16.001 & 2) that had different classes using cgs, mks, and mills. They all met in the same classroom (different times of course!), so there was no spacial reminder. But we all survived.
Re:GNU Units
by extraduder_ire on Thursday August 03, 2023 @02:14PM
(#36989576)
Have you ever accidentally set your calculator to gradians? We were warned about it when doing trigonometry in school, the first time we had to go between degrees and radians.
I think the root cause here was continued use of medieval units, instead of just standardizing on the metric system as it's already done around nearly the entire world.