Hello Steven, thanks for your great work on Units! On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 3:11 PM, Steven Watanabe via Boost-users < boost-users@lists.boost.org> wrote:
The meaning is literally division. (1.0 * meters) / meters = 1.0 If the expression exactly cancels out all units, then the result is dimensionless and can be implicitly converted to a double.
OK, I see. From my perspective, having never used Units this was not quite
intuitive if you don't mind me say so. If you would allow me to get a
little off topic....
My reason behind switching to units was that I wanted to get rid of
implicit assumptions about what unit a quantity is in. I am in a client /
server environment and store such vectors coming from a client that uses
centimeters as all units. Now I expect further clients and want to be
prepared for them to use other units, say millimeters. By using Units I
intend to push that translation to the foremost interface of the system and
not translate anything behind that.
I have much appreciated the constructor of quantity and the fact that it
fails to compile without a unit to give meaning to a scalar. This is an
excellent design paradigm and will help eliminate bugs!
qlength q(42.0 * meters);
Nice.
My problem that led to the above misconception was, that I needed to
translate that back and forth to the client. From the client was quite
easy:
qlength q(4200.0 * centi*meters);
Looks good enough. But getting the value back in centimeters was not. I
tried:
double raw_value_to_send_back = q / centi*meters;
But this won't compile. So I looked into scaled units and typedefed this:
typedef boost::units::make_scaled_unit<
boost::units::si::length,
boost::units::scale<10, boost::units::static_rational<-2> > >::type
centimeters;
And now I can convert into centimers like this:
double raw_value_to_send_back = quantity