An Ada package for dimensional analysis

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An Ada package for dimensional analysis

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ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) archive
Volume 10 , Issue 2 (April 1988) table of contents

Pages: 189 - 203

Year of Publication: 1988

ISSN:0164-0925

Author

Paul N. Hilfinger

Univ. of California, Berkeley

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 3, Downloads (12 Months): 48, Citation Count: 8

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ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates the use of Ada's abstraction facilities—notably, operator overloading and type parameterization—to define an oft-requested feature: a way to attribute units of measure to variables and values. The definition given allows the programmer to specify units of measure for variables, constants, and parameters; checks uses of these entities for dimensional consistency; allows arithmetic between them, where legal; and provides scale conversions between commensurate units. It is not constrained to a particular system of measurement (such as the metric or English systems). Although the definition is in standard Ada and requires nothing special of the compiler, certain reasonable design choices in the compiler, discussed here at some length, can make its implementation particularly efficient.

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.

	1	GEHANI, N. Units of measure as a data attribute. Comput. Lang. 2, 3 (1977), 93-111.
	2	N. H. Gehani, Ada's derived types and units of measure, Software—Practice & Experience, v.15 n.6, p.555-569, June 1985 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380150604]
	3	Paul N. Hilfinger, Abstraction Mechanisms and Language Design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983
	4	R. T. House, A proposal for an extended form of type checking of expressions, The Computer Journal, v.26 n.4, p.366-374, Nov. 1983
	5	Michael Karr , David B. Loveman, III, Incorporation of units into programming languages, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.5, p.385-391, May 1978 [doi>10.1145/359488.359501]
	6	NESTOR, J., AND VAN DEUSEN, M. RED Language Reference Manual. Intermetrics, Cambridge, Mass., 1979.
	7	R. A. O'Keefe, Alternatives to keyword parameters, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.20 n.6, June 1985 [doi>10.1145/988336.988340]
	8	Benjamin G. Zorn, Experiences with Ada Code Generation, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 1984

CITED BY 8

	Mikael Rittri, Dimension inference under polymorphic recursion, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture, p.147-159, June 26-28, 1995, La Jolla, California, United States
	Gordon S. Novak, Jr., Conversion of Units of Measurement, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.21 n.8, p.651-661, August 1995
	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
	Roman Cunis, A package for handling units of measure in Lisp, ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers, v.V n.2, p.21-25, April-June 1992
	Lingxiao Jiang , Zhendong Su, Osprey: a practical type system for validating dimensional unit correctness of C programs, Proceeding of the 28th international conference on Software engineering, May 20-28, 2006, Shanghai, China
	Zerksis D. Umrigar, Fully static dimensional analysis with C++, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.29 n.9, p.135-139, Sept. 1994
	P. Collard, Object-oriented programming techniques with Ada: an example, ACM SIGAda Ada Letters, v.IX n.6, p.119-126, Sep./Oct. 1989
	Geoffrey Biggs , Bruce A. Macdonald, A pragmatic approach to dimensional analysis for mobile robotic programming, Autonomous Robots, v.25 n.4, p.405-419, November 2008

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
D. Software
D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
D.3.2 Language Classifications

Nouns: Ada

General Terms:
Languages, Measurement, Reliability

REVIEW

"Trevor R. Hanson : Reviewer"

Dimensional analysis is a technique used to verify that numeric quantities are used in accordance with their units of measure (e.g., lengths should not be added to masses). This paper is essentially a response to a statement by O'K more...

Collaborative Colleagues:

Paul N. Hilfinger: colleagues

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