Back in the 70s, Hal Finney was writing a BASIC interpreter to fit in 2K of ROM on the Mattel Intellivision system. This meant every byte was precious. To report a syntax error, he shortened the message for all errors to:

    EH?

If the original setting had been named something bool-y like `help.autocorrect_enabled`, then the request to accept an int (deciseconds) would've made no sense. Another setting `help.autocorrect_accept_after_dsec` would've been required. And `dsec` is so oddball that anyone who uses it would've had to look up.

I insist on this all the time in code reviews. Variables must have units in their names if there's any ambiguity. For example, `int timeout` becomes `int timeout_msec`.

This is 100x more important when naming settings, because they're part of your public interface and you can't ever change them.

xmobar uses deciseconds in a similar, albeit more problematic place - to declare how often to refresh each section. Using deciseconds is fantastic if your goal is for example configs to have numbers small enough that they clearly can't be milliseconds, resulting in people making the reasonable assumption that it must thus be seconds, and running their commands 10 times as often as they intended to. I've seen a number of accidental load spikes originating from this issue.