12/16 roof plane

[Joe Carrick]

Well I'll be darned. I draw a roof plane, open it for spec, and type into the box that says, "Pitch (in 12)", "12 in 16," and Chief returns, "12." The roof plane pitches to 12:12, or 45 degrees. I then respecify, I type, "12:16," and Chief returns, "28"" Things get steep.

I enter "12/16" and Chief returns "3/4"" Real shallow.

What setting am I missing?

You don't understand because you are not a programmer. Here is the programming method:

value of "12 in 16" is 12.00 (everything after the 12 is ignored)
value of "12:16" is 12+16 = 28.00 (something in the program changed the : to a +
value of 12/16 is 3/4

These things are only understood based on the programming language. Basically all of your examples are handled as a text string and in order to determine a numerical value of the text a subroutine is called. It's the subroutine that looks at each character and constructs a numerical value. Programatically that would look like:

nValue := val("12 in 16") = 12
nValue := val("12")+val("16") = 28 // note: programmer replaced the : with a +
nValue := val("12")/val("16") = 3/4