[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Dimensional 0.4 -- Statically checked physical dimensions

[Björn Buckwalter]

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce version 0.4 of Dimensional (working name).

Dimensional is a library providing data types for performing
arithmetic with physical quantities and units. Information about the
physical dimensions of the quantities/units is embedded in their types
and the validity of operations is verified by the type checker at
compile time. The boxing and unboxing of numerical values as
quantities is done by multiplication and division with units.

The library is designed to, as far as is practical, enforce/encourage
best practices [1] of unit usage.

Since the previous formal announcement [2] (version 0.1) Dimensional
has gone through several structural and stylistic improvements but
usage remains fundamentally unchanged. Noteworthy changes are a vastly
solidified 'NumType' module, a complete(?) set of elementary functions
and a 'Prelude'-replacement for users' convenience. There is also an
experimental 'Extensible' module supporting user-defined dimensions.

Additional structural changes and additions (primarily of units) are
planned and the library will continue to have an unstable API until
the 1.0 release. However, apart from module reshuffling no changes are
anticipated that would break user code.

Additional information and code is available from the project web site [3].

Thank you,
Bjorn Buckwalter


[1] http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/
[2] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2006-December/018993.html
[3] http://code.google.com/p/dimensional/