"Dave Steffen" <dgsteffen@numerica.us> wrote in message news:17644.39259.602176.507250@yttrium.numerica.us...
Greer, Joe writes: [...]
Also, make sure that you are solving problems that are really likely to occur. It is nice to be as absolutely type safe as possible, but often that gets in the way of getting real work done as well. Just a thought.
Ya know, that's a very good point, and it puts a name to that little nagging thing that's been bugging me during this whole discussion.
What, exactly, are this library's use cases?
All kinds of people want all kinds of things. It seems to me that most of the discussion about these libraries - both the current one and the-library-recently-renamed Quan - are circular swirls of "I'd like it to do this" and "but then what about that".
This is merely because the use cases are potentially pretty wide. In the review I made it clear that I was limiting the scope of Quan to the SI unit system, because that is the one I understand. If I resubmitted the library it could be rejected as not being generic enough and there are inklings from this thread that this may be the reaction. But I don't have the time or the knowledge to write a truly generic physical quantities library and if that is the requirement then there isnt much point in resubmitting Quan for another review AFAICS.
I think this is because there is not clearly stated purpose to "Unit Library". What, exactly, is it used for? What code can you not write that you could write with the Units Library/Quan? What errors can you make now that you can't make with Units Library/Quan?
Maybe these questions have been answered, and I didn't notice 'em going past; but based on these discussions, I'm inclined to think that in general, no two people agree on exactly _why_ these libraries are useful.
You can read about the rationale behind Quan in the docs: http://tinyurl.com/fowwc regards Andy Little