VOUnits: _another_ version, based on implementation feedback

[Marco Molinaro]

Dear Semantics WG-ers,

2013/10/28 Markus Demleitner <msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de>

> Dear Semantics WG,
>
> Let me first thank Norman for doing the heavy lifting on this.
> VOUnits has become a really useful document by now.
>

I agree, and offers also some fun while reading :)


> In section 2.4, there's:
>
>   Future versions of this specification may add to the set of known units.
>
> This means that adding new known units requires a new version (with a
> new major?  a new minor?).  I'm ok with this, but given that the
> well-formedness of a VOUnit string doesn't depend on known units any
> more, I suspect our future selves will be grateful to us if we had a
> more lightweight process here (I've not investigated the UCD
> acceptance process in a long while, but might that be not a precedent
> to look at here?)
>
> As for me, I'm ok with new documents, too (but maybe a clarification
> that adding units will only bump the minor would be helpful).
>

I can live with minor document revisions, mainly because I think the
units list will not change too much frequently.
I'd definitely prefer something else, UCD-like can be a solution, to be
linked in the doc and future revisions.

...then to shorten my reply:

- I prefer no underscores
- I like the "unknown" instead of '?'
- I don't think we need prefixes to 'quoted' units
- I'll prefer having no quoted functions
- I have no particular opinion on the deci/deka problem, but I like Markus'
rewording:

May I suggest to change:
>
>   We can think of no cases where the ambiguity is plausible enough
>   that resolving it is worth the specification effort, so we deem the
>   parse of da.* to be unspecified.
>
> to:
>
>   In the light of this ambiguitiy, we leave the parse of da.*
>   unspecified.  This means that unit authors SHOULD not apply the
>   deci-prefix to units starting with a and not apply the deka-prefix
>   at all.
>

and finally


> I'm sure a lot of Austrians will hate me for that -- when I was last
> there, people would ask for "10 deka[sc. gram] of that Tiroler goat
> cheese" --, but maybe this affront could be an incentive for an
> Austrian contribution to the VO.
>

this happens also in Trieste (with ham or similar cold cuts), I was told by
my slovenian teacher that this comes from slovenian actually, so it could
be some empire heritage.

Cheers,
    Marco
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