[Haskell-cafe] ANN: engineering-units-0.0.1

[Iustin Pop]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 11:30:44AM -0500, Tom Hawkins wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just uploaded a handy library for managing engineering units.  It
> provides a Num type that allows you to mix units into calculations.  It
> also converts between units automatically and will error out if you try to
> mix values with inconsistent units.
> 
> Here's an example that computes the horsepower of a hydraulic pump (power =
> pressure * flow):
> 
>   flow = 20 * gpm            -- Gallons per minute.
>   pressure = 3000 * psi  -- Pounds per square inch.
>   power = pressure * flow
> 
>   powerHP = value power hp     -- Get the value in horsepower.
>   powerKW = value power kw    -- Get the value in Kilowatts.
> 
> If you don't see your units in the library, it's easy to add new ones:
> 
>   mm :: Value
>   mm = 0.001 * m

Hi Tom,

Looking at your documentation, I see a lot of sense behind implementing
different units (Horsepower vs. Watts), but I'm not so sure about (for
example) g/kg or m/cm/mm. These are just (SI) scaling factors, so should
they be treated the same as individual units?

For just the scaling factors, I released last year
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/prefix-units, and I'm wondering if we
couldn't somehow combine these two libraries. After all, "k" applies
both to KG and KW :)

thanks,
iustin