On 2 June 2010 01:21, Alex Cartwright <alexc...@googlemail.com> wrote: > As a use case: Harry visits the FAQ to see what the value of 'K' means, it > shows that K means 1 Kibibyte. As Harry knows what a Kibibyte is, he knows > that 'K' should be 1024 bytes. Adam on the other hand, has no idea what a > Kibibyte is and so continues to read the FAQ which states that 1 Kibyte = 1024 > bytes (like the documentation currently does, albeit with wrong wording).
I do know what a kibibyte is, thank you! :P (Sorry, couldn't resist. Moving on...) > My point being is that those who know the real value can continue to use the > real value; those that don't can either A) read a few words further or read up > on what a 'kibibyte' is, which takes less than 10 seconds. Something any > competent developer should be able to do. Given the number of supposedly competent developers who seem to miss important bits of PHP manual pages as it is, I don't hold out as much hope as you do on that front. Additionally, kilobyte is, in my experience, still the standard term for "1024 bytes" in most technical environments. I just conducted a quick (and admittedly extremely unscientific) poll of half a dozen coworkers (a mix of programmers and admins), and when asked what a kilobyte was, all answered 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes. Honestly, this seems like an advocacy issue to me, and I don't think the PHP manual is the right place to be advocating the adoption of specialist binary prefixes. I'd prefer to go with whatever common usage is, and 2¹⁰ still seems like the common usage to me. Adam
