Re: [h5md-user] units module

[Peter Colberg]

On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 09:44:50AM +0200, Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> I am all for Unicode in human-readable text, but does it really
> provide an advantage for a binary format like H5MD, which is always
> handled by specialized code? Unicode handling is still a hassle in
> many situations, so it needs to be justified by concrete advantages.

The short symbols are nice for display. The long identifiers require a
reader to use the udunits2 library, or at least a self-written lookup
table of long identifiers and short symbols.

Since ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, a writer can set the encoding to
UTF-8 and write ASCII units exclusively. It is only when Å is used
that unicode support is required.

My suggestion would be to support one <symbol> for each unit in

  udunits2-accepted.xml
  udunits2-base.xml
  udunits2-derived.xml
  udunits2-prefixes.xml

Alternatively, the units module could define one <name> for each unit.

Regards,
Peter