From: Emre  Sevinc
Subject: Re: study #11: type checking physical unit systems: preventing Mars Lander catastrophes
Date: 
Message-ID: <1187561845.084508.133060@r34g2000hsd.googlegroups.com>
On Aug 19, 2:50 pm, Mark Tarver <··········@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
> I got this message as email; the body quoted is taken from a
> comp.lang.functional post.  The poster asked if I had written anything
> relevant.
>  Example 1: Physical unit systems.
>  E.g. temperature. You can have Kelvin, degrees Fahrenheit, and
> degrees Celsius.
>
>  I'd like to pass a temperature to a function and have somebody
>  (system, function itself, whatever) automagically convert the
> temperature to the type that the function's logic expects.
>
> Similar issues exist for other unit systems. There's even a famous
> failed Mars mission where software modules didn't interoperate
> properly because one used metric and the other used nonmetric length
> units.

A comment from programming.reddit:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/2gok7/comments

> If you want actual source code you can use for attaching real world units to numbers, and carrying
> them through the calculations, and getting compile errors on mismatches, see:
>
> http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/1998/conf/Conf-98-328.pdf
>
> "Introduction to the SILibrary of Unit-Based Computation" by WalterE. Brown

From: Rainer Joswig
Subject: Re: study #11: type checking physical unit systems: preventing Mars Lander catastrophes
Date: 
Message-ID: <joswig-18DE85.03482320082007@news-europe.giganews.com>
In article <························@r34g2000hsd.googlegroups.com>,
 Emre  Sevinc <···········@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Aug 19, 2:50 pm, Mark Tarver <··········@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
> > I got this message as email; the body quoted is taken from a
> > comp.lang.functional post.  The poster asked if I had written anything
> > relevant.
> >  Example 1: Physical unit systems.
> >  E.g. temperature. You can have Kelvin, degrees Fahrenheit, and
> > degrees Celsius.
> >
> >  I'd like to pass a temperature to a function and have somebody
> >  (system, function itself, whatever) automagically convert the
> > temperature to the type that the function's logic expects.
> >
> > Similar issues exist for other unit systems. There's even a famous
> > failed Mars mission where software modules didn't interoperate
> > properly because one used metric and the other used nonmetric length
> > units.
> 
> A comment from programming.reddit:
> 
> http://programming.reddit.com/info/2gok7/comments
> 
> > If you want actual source code you can use for attaching real world units to numbers, and carrying
> > them through the calculations, and getting compile errors on mismatches, see:
> >
> > http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/1998/conf/Conf-98-328.pdf
> >
> > "Introduction to the SILibrary of Unit-Based Computation" by WalterE. Brown

[cunis92] R. Cunis, ``A Package for Handling Units of Measure in Lisp'',
ACM Lisp Pointers, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992.

http://www.isi.edu/isd/LOOM/documentation/measures-implementation.text
http://www.isi.edu/isd/LOOM/documentation/measures-usage.text


http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/lisp/code/syntax/measures/0.html
From: Mark Tarver
Subject: Re: study #11: type checking physical unit systems: preventing Mars Lander catastrophes
Date: 
Message-ID: <1187606430.794113.161120@22g2000hsm.googlegroups.com>
On 20 Aug, 02:48, Rainer Joswig <······@lisp.de> wrote:
> In article <························@r34g2000hsd.googlegroups.com>,
>  Emre  Sevinc <···········@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Aug 19, 2:50 pm, Mark Tarver <··········@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
> > > I got this message as email; the body quoted is taken from a
> > > comp.lang.functional post.  The poster asked if I had written anything
> > > relevant.
> > >  Example 1: Physical unit systems.
> > >  E.g. temperature. You can have Kelvin, degrees Fahrenheit, and
> > > degrees Celsius.
>
> > >  I'd like to pass a temperature to a function and have somebody
> > >  (system, function itself, whatever) automagically convert the
> > > temperature to the type that the function's logic expects.
>
> > > Similar issues exist for other unit systems. There's even a famous
> > > failed Mars mission where software modules didn't interoperate
> > > properly because one used metric and the other used nonmetric length
> > > units.
>
> > A comment from programming.reddit:
>
> >http://programming.reddit.com/info/2gok7/comments
>
> > > If you want actual source code you can use for attaching real world units to numbers, and carrying
> > > them through the calculations, and getting compile errors on mismatches, see:
>
> > >http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/1998/conf/Conf-98-328.pdf
>
> > > "Introduction to the SILibrary of Unit-Based Computation" by WalterE. Brown
>
> [cunis92] R. Cunis, ``A Package for Handling Units of Measure in Lisp'',
> ACM Lisp Pointers, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992.
>
> http://www.isi.edu/isd/LOOM/documentation/measures-implementation.texthttp://www.isi.edu/isd/LOOM/documentation/measures-usage.text
>
> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/lisp/code/...- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

Thanks; I've put these links into the page together with the link to
the 1998 C++ paper.

Mark

Mark