Fractional Amounts Rendered as Decimal Fractions?

[dvergin]

I'm puzzled that the tests in canonical.yaml show that fractional amounts (e.g. 1/2, 1/4) are to be rendered in the ingredient list as decimal fractions (e.g. 0.5, 0.25).

I have not seen published recipes (in the U.S.) that use decimal fractions for portions of cups, etc.

I recognize that decimal fractions for amounts might make some sense in a metric world. But for use in the U.S., seeing "0.125 cup milk" in an ingredient list when the recipe specified "1/8 cup milk" seems sub-optimal.

I also understand that it is non-trivial to handle amounts like 1/8 or 2/3 in fractional form if we want to automate increasing/decreasing the number of servings. (We have a five-serving recipe but the user wants four servings. How do we render four-fifths of 2/3??)

I observe in EBNF.md that is is possible to force rendering a fractional amount as-is by using white space (e.g. '1 / 8' instead of '1/8') but (IMHO) the result is not aesthetically pleasing in the ingredient list.

In my case, I could easily use the whitespace trick in the directions and then delete the whitespace before displaying the ingredients. But I'd like to have a better understanding of the present state of things before kludging up a way to circumvent the standard.

My hope would be that there would be a way to specify that a fractional amount (without spaces) is to be rendered in the ingredient list in the form given in the directions (i.e. as a fraction, not a decimal).

Quite possibly I am missing something. Apart from my guessing, what is the rationale for specifying that amounts given as fractions in the recipe are to be rendered as decimal fractions in the ingredients list?

Regards & TIA,
David