Strong typing and physical units

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Strong typing and physical units

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ACM SIGPLAN Notices archive
Volume 21 , Issue 3 (March 1986) table of contents

Pages: 11 - 20

Year of Publication: 1986

ISSN:0362-1340

Author

R. Männer

Physical Institute, University of Heidelberg, F.R. Germany

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 0, Downloads (12 Months): 18, Citation Count: 5

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ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a syntactic extension of high level languages like PASCAL or ADA to allow the usage of physical quantities, i.e. numbers with units, instead of just numbers. It offers enhanced type checking for expressions and assignments during compilation time. Additionally, it allows problem oriented simple scaling of variables and local scale selection. Furthermore, it reduces the number of coding errors due to wrongly chosen scales. After a discussion of mutual relations between strong typing in programming languages and physical units, examples are shown to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed extension. Finally a graph representation of the new syntactic elements is given.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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CITED BY 5

	Eric Allen , David Chase , Victor Luchangco , Jan-Willem Maessen , Guy L. Steele, Jr., Object-oriented units of measurement, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.39 n.10, October 2004
	Geoff Baldwin, Implementation of physical units, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.22 n.8, p.45-50, August 1, 1987
	A Dreiheller , B Mohr , M Moerschbacher, Programming pascal with physical units, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.21 n.12, p.114-123, Dec. 1986
	Daniel J. Salomon, Four Dimensions of programming-language independence, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.27 n.3, p.35-53, March 1992
	Richard C. Waters, System validation via constraint modeling, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.26 n.8, p.27-36, Aug. 1991