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Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

You realise that in the UK, an address is completely specified by house number and postcode? Nine characters max.

Not all houses in the UK have numbers, especially in rural areas. If you don't live in a village or larger, it's pretty common to have a house name, and no number. (Edit: I just checked the village I grew up in, and was surprised to find that out of 48 houses covered by the postcode, 41 of them only have a house name, no number -- I'd have guessed closer to a 50/50 ratio).

Even in cities, it's not particularly unusual to have houses that don't have numbers, especially older houses -- in my parents' postcode, two of the houses only have a name.

House names are fully supported by correctly implemented postcode lookup systems -- for example, in the common online use-case where you enter your postcode and a list of houses is brought up, the list will include the houses that only have name identifiers.

> Nine characters max

Post code is max 7 characters. People could live at number 123, which is over 9 characters. Or they could live at a flat and house number - flat 1, number 12. Which is again over 9 characters.

So 10 characters max. Actually 11 because I think you could have 123a

You should never have to specify more than 1 number. If you have to say flat 1, number 12 the post office needs to assign you a new number (e.g. 12a).

Still beats the hell out of MARAMUT-GACIRA, especially as post codes give a lot of information (I know instantly whether a postcode is in or outside London, and if inside roughly where)

Instantly, that's impressive? I can only manage that if you define London as "The area covered by the London compass-direction based postal districts" If you choose either "governed by a London Borough Council", or "Within the M25" or "Within the City of London", I'd have to look it up.

The postcode district states which sorting office delivers to the address, leading to upmarket Windsor having a Slough postcode SL5

EC1A - inside The City; EC1M - outside The City.

EN1 - in a London Borough; EN10 - In a Hertfordshire borough.

KT9 - Inside M25 and in a London Borough; KT11 Inside M25 and in a Surrey borough.

Maybe not for everything, and i'm sure there are loads of technicalities on the edge of london.

But for your examples:

EC1A and EC1M are both in or around the city

EN1 is enfield I think? So far north, EN10 I imagine is just further north

KT9 I think is Kingston. Both KT9 and KT11 are probably south west near the edge of london

> I can only manage that if you define London as "The area covered by the London compass-direction based postal districts"

That's actually basically what I meant. Compass postcode = london, non-compass is effectively outside london (or on the very edge)

Either way, the point that post codes carry a lot more information than codes generated from GPS coordinates still stands

OK OK, I lose to pedantry :-)

that works great for a place that post is delivered to, but what about when you want to specify a different location. What3Words is the better solution.

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