Hi Jonathan, et al.,
I'm not sufficiently expert in IUPAC to be definitive, but I don't think
all the common names we may want for CF are approved by IUPAC. However,
if a non-systematic name is approved by IUPAC, it would certainly give it
more weight to me.
I do agree that following IUPAC is one, of several, desirable attributes
for a chemical name, so that non-IUPAC names deserve closer scrutiny and
greater justification for CF. In my view the proposed names do meet the
higher standard (they are much better known, shorter, unambiguous, and
many are IUPAC approved).
BTW, I found the following link to IUPAC that lists 'trivial and
semisystematic names' that may be relevant to such decisions in the
future:
http://www.acdlabs.com/iupac/nomenclature/93/r93_671.htm
Best wishes,
Philip
On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Jonathan Gregory wrote:
> Dear Martin and Philip
>
> IUPAC names: I agree that a pragmatic approach is the right one, and as you
> say we have already gone that way in adopting some non-IUPAC names previously
> (we have discussed this before, in fact). If IUPAC "approves" some non-
> systematic names, that is helpful too. Would it be practicable to take this as
> a criterion for use in CF? In any case, it is a good idea to include the IUPAC
> name in the description of the quantity. The concern I had was that it could
> be confusing to users of CF standard names if there wasn't a clear pattern
> for when IUPAC names were used. An advantage of having a rule is that it helps
> users to remember the names, I think. That's why I was wondering whether it
> would be satisfactory to have acetic acid along with ethane, ethene and ethyne.
> However, some arbitrariness may be unavoidable.
>
> "total" or nothing: Yes, if
> mole_fraction_of_inorganic_bromine_in_air
> mole_fraction_of_reactive_nitrogen_in_air
> are clear enough, we could introduce these and makes aliases of the names with
> "total".
>
> Best wishes
>
> Jonathan
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Philip Cameron-Smith Atmospheric, Earth, and Energy Division
pjc at llnl.gov Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
+1 925 4236634 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA94550, USA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Fri Sep 26 2008 - 12:19:15 BST
