[COFF] Re: A second Unix Patent

Hi Phil, Copying to the COFF list, hope that's okay. I thought it might interest them. That's interesting, thanks. I've access to a FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE-p6, if that version number means something to you. Its units groks ^ to mean power when applied to a unit, as the fine units(1) says, but not to a number. Whereas * works. $ units yd^3 ft^3 * 27 / 0.037037037 $ $ units 6\*7 21 * 2 / 0.5 $ $ units 2^4 64 * 0.03125 / 32 $ The last one silently treats 2^4 as 2; I'd say that's a bug. It has Ki- and byte allowing $ units -t Kibyte bit 8192 but lacks GNU's B byte Fair enough, though I think that's common enough now to be included. FreeBSD also seems to have another bug: demanding a space between the quantity and the unit for fundamental ‘!’ units. $ units m 8m conformability error 1 m 8 $ units m '8 m' * 0.125 / 8 $ I found this when attempting the obvious $ units Kibyte 8bit conformability error 8192 bit 8 $ units Kibyte '8 bit' * 1024 / 0.0009765625 $ Whilst I'm not a GNU acolyte, in this case its version of units does seem to have had a bit more TLC. :-) -- Cheers, Ralph.