[Python-ideas] the Quantity pattern

[Mike Meyer]

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?

	 <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

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