On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Keith <keith.braff...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am considering writing a PEP for the inclusion of an engineering > format specifier, and would appreciate input from others. > > Background (for those who don't already know about engineering > notation): > > Engineering notation (EN) is type of floating point representation. > The idea with EN is that the powers of 10 are all multiples of 3, > which correspond to the familiar Greek unit prefixes that engineers > use when describing the different sizes of all sorts of real-world > devices and phenomena: > > 1e-12 == pico > 1e-9 == nano > 1e-6 == micro > 1e-3 == milli > 1e+3 == kilo > 1e+6 == mega > 1e+9 == giga > > When people are talking about Ohms, Farads, Henries, Hz, and many > others, they routinely have to normalize to EN. Fancy calculators > from HP and TI routinely allow the users to go into engineering mode, > but mysteriously things like C, Python, Excel, etc. don't > > For instance, no one talks about 4.7e-5F, as they would rather see > 47e-6 (micro). Instead of 2.2e-2, engineers need to see 22.0e-3 > (milli). <snip> > There are places on the web where I've read that people have to work > their butts off trying to "trick" Excel or OpenOffice to do > engineering notation, or there is some work-around that is purported > to work if you use the right version of the spreadsheet.
Relevant related information: The Decimal datatype supports engineering format directly: http://docs.python.org/library/decimal.html#decimal.Decimal.to_eng_string Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
