On Sat, February 21, 2009 1:46 pm, Jonathan Stratford wrote: > In response to the questions left for me below. > >>BTW, does your unit converter >>(http://klein.activemath.org:90/~jonathan/units/converter.php) support >> such compound units for which no explicit symbol has been defined? > Yes, it can cope with many of these (it can't cope with all of them as the > algorithm's by no means perfect). For some reason, I can't get the online > version to load, but the following (just picking 2 examples from my > testing) > work both with the version that was in my dissertation, and my local copy > of what I think is on klein.activemath.org (it's slightly updated): > > 17.3 millimetre per nanosecond sqrd to mile per hour sqrd > 6 ounce inch per minute sqrd to kilogramme metre per second sqrd > >>Then, a final question about that unit converter: I can convert hours to >>minutes, but for minutes to seconds, and hours to seconds, it tells me > >>> The two units were known, but found to be different dimensions. Please >>> supply a definition for the units to reconcile this difference, >>> remembering to ensure the new definition has a different name. >>> >>> 1 hour to second is incalculable. > > I'm not certain offhand what the problem with seconds is, but I would > suspect it is because the unit "second" appears in both units_metric1 and > units_time1, and the algorithm's picking the one in metric, then failing > to > find the path through to units_time1. My lookup algorithm returned the > first > unit it came across that matched the name "second", and then if the other > unit was a different dimension, there was no way to go back and look for > another unit. I mentioned it in my dissertation: > > "It is unclear whether the unit second should be removed from either of This certainly needs tidying up.
James Davenport Visiting Full Professor, University of Waterloo Otherwise: Hebron & Medlock Professor of Information Technology and Chairman, Powerful Computing WP, University of Bath OpenMath Content Dictionary Editor IMU Committee on Electronic Information and Communication _______________________________________________ Om mailing list [email protected] http://openmath.org/mailman/listinfo/om
