On 26 August 2016 at 06:06, Ken Kundert <python-id...@shalmirane.com> wrote: > Here is a fairly typical example that illustrates the usefulness of supporting > SI scale factors and units in Python.
Ken, To build a persuasive case, you'll find it's necessary to stop comparing Python-with-syntactic-support to Python-with-no-syntactic-support-and-no-third-party-libraries, and instead bring in the existing dimensional analysis libraries and tooling, and show how this change would improve *those*. That is, compare your proposed syntax *not* to plain Python code, but to Python code using some of the support libraries Steven D'Aprano mentioned, whether that's SymPy (as in http://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/physics/unitsystems/examples.html ) or one of the other unit conversion libraries (as in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2125076/unit-conversion-in-python ) It's also worth explicitly highlighting that the main intended beneficiaries would *NOT* be traditional software applications (where the data entry UI is clearly distinct from the source code) and instead engineers, scientists, and other data analysts using environments like Project Jupyter, where the code frequently *is* the data entry UI. And given that target audience, a further question that needs to be addressed is whether or not native syntactic support would be superior to what's already possible through Jupyter/IPython cell magics like https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/ipython-physics The matrix multiplication PEP (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0465/ ) is one of the best examples to study on how to make this kind of case well - it surveys the available options, explains how they all have a shared challenge with the status quo, and requests the simplest possible enabling change to the language definition to help them solve the problem. One potentially fruitful argument to pursue might be to make Python a better tool for teaching maths and science concepts at primary and secondary level (since Jupyter et al are frequently seen as introducing too much tooling complexity to be accessible at that level), but again, you'd need to explore whether or not anyone is currently using Python in that way, and what their feedback is in terms of the deficiencies of the status quo. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
