Mostly it's not. Charitably, someone writing software for e.g. a particle physics experiment might actually need to account for altitude to produce accurate results.
Of course, that's the sort of domain-specific demand that might not belong in a general-use list. People writing sound engineering software have to worry about all kinds of subtleties with sample rates and harmonics, but I wouldn't put that in a guide to basic data I/O - I might not even put it in a basic analog-to-digital guide.
