157
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
157 points (95.9% liked)
Programming
17314 readers
171 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
This is a cool idea. There are other programming languages that have libraries that expose similar behavior. For instance, Rust has the uom crate, Haskell has the units package, and C++ has the header only library SI.
But there is something to be said about it being built in.
The web page says other libraries implement units whereas they implement dimensions. 1 cm and 1 inch has the same dimension, namely length, and you are able to add them together and get a correct result. seems nice. I don't know if it'll have any practical benefit but I like it.
I can't talk about the other libraries but the uom crate does the same thing.
The dimensions are encoded as a vector of generics, allowing you to get the correct unit even when dividing a distance by time for example.
It's quite the clever use of Rusts type system.
For sure. It'd be nice to have the units in a separate namespace but at least Numbat won't let you override identifiers already defined in the system of measure. I use Pint on Python - I usually keep the units in an identifier named
uso they can't get accidentally overridden. That means either usingu.kmfor single units oru('g/cm^3')for composite units. It'd be great if the language could separate units e.g. as[km]or `` but getting a compact syntax to distinguish the units namespace without colliding with other language features would be tricky. I remember F# having a good syntax but didn't dive that deep since it's not used widely in my field.