[Python-ideas] the Quantity pattern

[Robert Kern]

On 2010-03-02 18:17 PM, Mike Meyer wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Mar 2010 20:37:29 +0100
> George Sakkis<george.sakkis at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Robert Kern<robert.kern at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> On 2010-03-02 12:35 PM, Bill Janssen wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I was looking at Martin Fowler's Quantity pattern earlier.
>>>>
>>>> http://martinfowler.com/ap2/quantity.html
>>>>
>>>> I remember writing this up as an idea for Fortran back in the early
>>>> 80's, only to find a CACM paper from 1978 exploring the idea:
>>>> "Incorporation of Units into Programming Languages", Karr&    Loveman, May
>>>> 1978.
>>>>
>>>> But it would still be a cool idea for Python.  Perhaps it's already
>>>> there and I haven't noticed?
>>>
>>> Tons of implementations (in no particular order):
>>>
>>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/quantities/
>>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unum/
>>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/magnitude/
>>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/units/
>>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ScientificPython/
>>> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/SciMath/
>>>
>>> And quite a few more that are part of other packages or otherwise not on
>>> PyPI. It's ridiculously easy to write something that what people think are
>>> the common cases and so everyone does. It's a lot harder to write something
>>> that robustly handles what are actually common cases (absolute temperature
>>> scales, logarithmic scales, etc.).
>>
>> One more: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/piquant/
>>
>> I can't comment on its robustness and performance but as far as
>> readability goes, Unum seems the best of the bunch.
>
> Hmm. How about accessing the Frink
> (http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/) types from Jython?

You might be able to use it to do the unit conversion calculations, but the Java 
interface to Frink does not expose any types following the Quantity pattern. It 
just provides a way to evaluate strings in the Frink interpreter:

   http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/integrate/

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco