Other observations: 1) unit_test_1.cpp depends on the boost.regex library. (Some of us have never built the boost.regex library. My solution is just to skip unit_test_1.cpp for now.)
If you don't #define MCS_USE_DEMANGLING, this should not happen now.
I am not #defining MCS_USE_DEMANGLING, but VC++8.0 tries to link to the boost regex library. Can this be fixed?
Sorry - I should have been more clear; I inserted a #define MCS_USE_DEMANGLING in unit_test_1.cpp. If you comment it out, that should eliminate the boost::regex dependency... N.B. if you look too closely at this example, there are a couple of errors - not in the code, but in the type definitions...missing a minus sign in the time dimension of energy...I'll have them fixed in the next release, which will also eliminate the demangling option unless you're using g++. Also, for the next release I'll have a version that allows arbitrary binary operations between quantities (limited, of course, by the operations supported by the underlying value_type) that deduces return type using typeof. That is, for some arbitrary value types X and Y for which (warning pseudocode ahead) Z operator+(X x,Y y) is defined quantity<Z> operator+(quantity<X> x,quantity<Y> y) will work and behave as expected... Currently this feature will only work on gcc or other compilers that have already implemented typeof, but I'm hoping that it will just be ignored on other platforms as long as the code doesn't actually call operators with two different types, assuming I've written the type conversion helpers right... Eventually I'll look into Boost.Typeof, if there's enough interest. For the most part, this feature is probably just a curiosity for the average programmer, but it's a good test and allows more interesting algebras to be associated with units...my demo code (mostly functional except for power<N>/root<N>) is for a scaled value type (something like Andy Little does internally) that carries with the value type a base/exponent pair, so you could write values in scientific notation like this : 5.67 x 10^7 -> scaled_value<float,scale<10,7> >(5.67) svalue; Here, if you multiply this by itself, you get a new type: svalue*svalue -> scaled_value<float,scale<10,14> >(5.67*5.67) It's amusing and might actually be useful...
2) The unit tests appear to build using gcc 3.4.4, but not with VC8.0.
The latest version of the examples builds and runs with VC8.0 (except unit_example_1, because I have not tried to build the boost regex library).
That's good news - I don't have a Windows box, so I can't check this myself...
In many ways your library looks nice, but I need to check out Ben's more carefully too.
Thanks. In all honesty, I would be happy to collaborate on this with others who are interested and have a compatible paradigm - I don't really have much experience dealing with issues such as IO facets, etc..., and there are a number of issues surrounding IO and serialization that probably need to be thought about and addressed. Obviously, because units are defined at compile time input will be restricted to cases where the type is known anyway, so it doesn't seem like there's really much point in parsing unit input (for this library - clearly, a runtime units library would want to do that...). Anyway, I appreciate the feedback... Matthias