[phobos] RFC: units type for D

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

This is a very interesting discussion, with great points. Here's what I 
think - in brief, my experience time and again has been that stuff that 
has a strong champion behind it succeeds, and stuff that doesn't, 
doesn't. In light of that, if Benjamin and/or David are enthused about 
pushing their libraries into Phobos, and furthermore maintaining and 
enhancing them, and further-furthermore contributing in new ways to 
Phobos, then I think it's not crucial that dimensional analysis (and 
possibly rational numbers) are of narrow utility.

One less positive example is std.json - after adding it to Phobos, 
Jeremie didn't hang around to maintain it, bring its style on par with 
the rest of Phobos etc. Right now it's a library in need of a champion. 
Not to mention the likes of std.xml :o).

So, subject to the rest of the team being approving too, I'd say let's 
give dimensional analysis (and rational numbers too if David wants) a 
fair shot at inclusion in Phobos. Be prepared for ruthlessness though :o).


Andrei

On 8/25/10 19:37 PDT, David Simcha wrote:
> One comment I want to make is that, if we're going to include this, I
> have a rational number library on Scrapple that I've been meaning to put
> up for review for a while. I noticed that you roll your own somewhat
> ad-hoc rational numbers for the units type and don't really expose them
> in any more general way. IMHO if both rational and the units lib make
> the cut for Phobos, they should be integrated with each other. I'll
> clean up my rational library and do a commit, since it's succumbed to
> some degree of bit rot. It's at
> http://dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/rational/rational.d.
>
> On 8/25/2010 10:09 AM, Benjamin Shropshire wrote:
>> I have offered up a library that supports statically encoding units in
>> the type system so as to prevent unit errors (adding distance and
>> time) and to enforce correct conversions all around.
>>
>> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3725
>>
>> I'm looking for comments: What's holding it back from inclusion? What
>> would need to be improved? The API? Better comments? (I haven't tested
>> it recently so; make it build again?)
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