OT: cleaning pots on my vintage audio amp

From: Richard W. Schauer <rws_at_enteract.com>
Date: Tue Feb 19 14:33:12 2002

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Julius Sridhar wrote:
> Isn't the IUPAC convention to prefix the carbon number? Like so:
> 2-propanol?

It is convention to precede the part that is described by the number, by
the number. So propan-2-ol is correct, since it's the alcohol group
that's on the second carbon from the end. It would be ambiguous to
precede the whole thing with the numbers if there were two or more groups
attached to the carbon skeleton. Thus names like
1,2-dichloro-1-bromoprop-2-ene, for:

     Cl Cl
     | |
 H - C - C = C - H
     | |
     Br H


Richard Schauer
Received on Tue Feb 19 2002 - 14:33:12 GMT