gourlaysama

This is finally going away in the next version (2.11, which will hit RC1 next month) see [1].

[1]: https://github.com/scala/scala/pull/2305

You are completely right, I was confused by the first 1788 proposition. See edit.

Also, the weird thing was that, although they decided that an hour is divided in ten "parts", and each one of those in ten, and so one... they gave the name "minute" to the part of the part of the hour (so that 1 hour == 100 minutes), and the same for the second vs the minute.

I wonder how people managed to get a hang of this mess...

There was a proposition for a day of 10 hours, each having 100 minutes, each having 1000 seconds.

And later, with the calendar came a simpler version with 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute, and so on (Article XI of the "Décret de la Convention Nationale concernant l'Ere des Français" [1]). It was only official (and mandatory) for a few months, however [2].

Edit: the one with 1M seconds a day was only an earlier draft version that never made it into law.

[1]: http://www.gefrance.com/calrep/decrets.htm (in french)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France

"The reason you need to run a 16 bit installer" is to display a nice "Tough luck, you need a 32-bit computer to install this" message to the user, instead of an ugly Windows error message.

This was important at the time. And the whole point of backward compatibility is to allowed old applications (written, compiled and packaged at that time) to work.

Even if the software is open-source and has been repackaged in the meantime, the old version you found on a long-forgotten CD rotting away in your basement doesn't have that. The Windows philosophy is to make sure that this one still works (which is a crazy goal IMO, but an interesting one).

finally!