On Mon, Apr 4, 2022 at 2:24 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 03, 2022 at 10:42:16PM -0400, Ricky Teachey wrote:
I was cheerleading this effort earlier and I still think it would be a massive contribution to needs of the engineering world to solve this problem at the language level. But boy howdy is it a tough but of a problem to crack.
More than 35 years of prior art says hello.
My HP-28C calculator supported unit conversion in the mid 1980s, and a few years later HP were offering calculators that supported arithmetic on units.
If you want to see some prior art, check out the chapters on Units here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150608024051/http://www.hp41.net/forum/fileshp...
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00442266.pdf
If you are on a Linux or Unix system, you can check out the "units" program:
[steve@ando ~]$ units "3 ounces * 200 furlongs per fortnight" "kg m/s" * 0.0028288774 / 353.49711
Then there is also Frink:
-- Steve
These are cool finds. There is also Mathcad, which beautifully solved the units problem well over 2 (3?) decades ago. Of course a Mathcad seat ain't cheap. And there's Maple, and matlab. All of these probably have things to teach us. Here is a screenshot of the Mathcad units system definition interface; it doesn't solve all the problems, but it solves many. [image: image.png] --- Ricky. "I've never met a Kentucky man who wasn't either thinking about going home or actually going home." - Happy Chandler
