On 9 Feb 2007, at 12:31, Andreas Harnack wrote:
james.jones@firstinvestors.com wrote:
I suspect this idea, while clever, does not cover the problem domain sufficiently well to be superior to lists.
Please have a look at the attached list. (I hope sending attachments works.)
This is a list of all SI units I could find on a quick search. The first two columns are nominator and denominator a corresponding rational number would have. Of course, this is not a proof, but the numbers suggest that for practical purposes we're not even getting near a range that's likely to be dangerous.
By the way, there's no need to worry about growing intermediate results: a/b * c/d is equal to a/d * c/b and these two factors can be normalized before the multiplication is carried out. If that's done and a/b and c/d were in normal form, then so will be the result and there's no intermediate result growing larger then the final product.
Andreas
Have you thought about negative powers, e.g. number densities (m^-3) Matthias