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A comment on The Devil in Plain Text. Parent comment

Re:The Devil in Plain Text by demetrius on Monday May 13, 2013 @10:08AM (#5698699)
Well, actually Kawa Scheme has a feature called quantities [1]. (+ 1cm 2m) equals to 201.0cm, (+ 1cm 2degr) throws an exception (degr has to be declared first, with (define-base-unit degr "Temperature")).

To tell the truth, I’ve never found any use for this feature.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/Quantities.html

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Re:The Devil in Plain Text by zokier on Monday May 13, 2013 @10:17AM (#5698762)
I'd imagine that such type/units system would be most useful in interactive use, like in WolframAlpha where the system has quite good "understanding" of units and how they should be applied to formulas.
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Re:The Devil in Plain Text by scott_s on Monday May 13, 2013 @12:56PM (#5699797)
It would be very useful in production code as well - consider the case of the Mars Climate Orbiter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_f...
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