Affiliation:
1. Physical Institute, University of Heidelberg, F.R. Germany
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.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design,Software
Cited by
11 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. An Empirical Study on Type Annotations;ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology;2021-03
2. HydroUnits: supporting dimensional analysis in hydrologic computing systems using sensor-based standards;Journal of Hydroinformatics;2015-12-04
3. A model-driven approach to automatic conversion of physical units;Software: Practice and Experience;2008
4. Object-oriented units of measurement;ACM SIGPLAN Notices;2004-10
5. Object-oriented units of measurement;Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications;2004-10