Bytes?

[mauris]

What about bytes? It would be very helpful if we can quickly change units in terms of bytes.

bits as well.

[triplepoint]

Yea, this idea seems legit.

I'm not sure where I stand on the 1000 vs 1024 conversion factor debate, once you get to megabyte and above. I know there's the Mebibyte vs Megabyte convention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte) but I feel like that's not very well used. Still, lacking a better way to distinguish, maybe that's the way to go? Either that or we just stick to the 1024 multiples and ignore the base-10 system altogether.

[mauris]

I think a 1024 multiples implementation would be better as calculations over thousands.

[MarkMaldaba]

I think this would be a great addition.

You could use "MiB" for mebibyte and "Mbyte" for megabyte (and so on for other magnitudes) and deliberately omit "MB" as a recognised unit, as it is inherently ambiguous. That way you avoid the confusion and allow both representations to be possible (as both will definitely be required, in different contexts).

You could maybe provide a way to specify that "mb" should be either base 10 or base 2 (with the default still being 'unrecognised') to save everyone having to manually add the aliases themselves, but that would be helpful, rather than essential.

[pierpaolocira]

Hi all,
in my honest opinion 1024 multiples can be more comfortable, but they are not formally correct.

In the International System of Units (SI) the "kilo" multiplier refers to 1000 and not to 1024... so, in my mind, to continue to be "accurated", to comply with the SI, and in order to keep the code coherence (HasSIUnitsTrait::addMissingSIPrefixedUnits()) we should use the standard "k" prefix for "kilo" and "ki" for "kibi" (etc...).

But, I repeat, this is just what I think a library user expects...

[MarkMaldaba]

@triplepoint Any chance of an explanation as to why this was closed? Has it been implemented, or is it a wontfix? Or something else?

[triplepoint]

Ah, I was cleaning up old tickets and mistakenly assumed this one was abandoned. If there's interest in it being implemented, I'll reopen. Thanks for the attention.

[timkelty]

Would love to see this as well!