"John Manders" wrote in message
...
Lets face it, whats the difference?
Inches are bigger than mm. Decimal inches and decimal mm are handled in
exactly the same way. The biggest arguement is fractions. Metric rarely
uses
them.
Other than that it's all down to what we are familiar with. People can
imagine a man who is 6 ft tall because they are used to that.
We (UK) used to be imperial. we even had strange money called shillings
and
pence. That was really cruel but some folks missed it when we went metric.
Could you Americans manage with 20 bigthings to the dollar and 12
littlethings per bigthing? Your money is metric, so are the number of your
fingers and the design of your numbers. All we have to do is get used to
the
units. The base 10 system works far better.

John


The fact that Metric is a base 10 system doesn't make a great deal of sense
in the computer world. Fractions are a lot easier to use in inches than in
metric simply because we tend to use a de facto binary methods with them. In
other words, it's easier to think in absolute terms with fractions than
discrete units. You'd think that the metric system could have anticipated
this, but the introduction was too early in relation to the timing of
widespread personal use of the device. A shame. Eighth of a millimeter
anyone?