Re: Dimensionality Checking (Ada 20XX)

[Thomas.Koenig@online.de (Thomas Koenig)]

James Rogers  <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

>The SI_Units package proposed can be useful, but also terribly limiting.
>The chosen units would be inappropriate for calculations dealing with
>submolecular physics, or astronomy. Neither of these fields should be
>systematically ignored by Ada.

In principle, this could be handled by declaring a certain variable
to be of type length and dimension of parsec (for example).

It should be allowed to add parsecs to angstrom; a reasonable
default would be to make the result of a+b to be the type of a.

Of course, assignment should then convert the value to whatever
the left hand side operator is.

People who like to specify thermal conductivity in
BTU/ft^2/(�F/in)... well, there's literature data out there which
specifies this.  I might just be tempted to draw the line there,
though :-)