SPICE, written by Larry Nagel, introduced the concept in 1972. It is a circuit simulator, and the language involved was a netlist language: basically a list of components, the nodes there were connected to, and their values. It looked like this:
R1 1 0 1K C1 1 0 1nF I1 1 0 1mA SPICE was an incredibly influential program used by virtually all circuit designers for decades. Interesting, it was very likely the first open source software project. It was developed at Berkeley as a free and open source project, well before those terms were in common use, and it was highly influential on the BSD UNIX developers, also at Berkeley, which in turn were influential on Stallman at MIT. Verilog, a hardware modeling language adopted the concept in a small scale (just for time) in the 1980's. Then in the early 90's Verilog-A was created, a version of Verilog designed to allow people to model analog circuits. It allowed use of SI scale factors for all real numbers. A few years later Verilog-AMS was released. It combined Verilog and Verilog-A. It also allows SI scale factors on all real numbers. I developed Verilog-A as well as Spectre, a replacement for SPICE, and so I am intimately familiar with language issues, the implementation issues, and the user issues of use of SI scale factors in particular, and computational programming in general. So SPICE was a netlist language, Verilog was a modeling language. I was not aware of any general purpose programming languages that offer supports for SI scale factors or units. RPL, Frink, and Fortress are new to me. I took a quick look at Frink and it does not look like a general purpose programming language either, more like a calculator language. That is, of course, what RPL is. Neither really look up to taking on a serious computational task. Fortress looks like a general purpose programming language, but little detail seems to remain about this language, and I found nothing on units or scale factors. -Ken On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 01:48:29PM +1000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 03:23:24PM -0700, Ken Kundert wrote: > > > Second, I concede that there is some chance that users may be lulled into > > a false sense of complacency and that some dimensional errors would get > > missed > > by these otherwise normally very diligent users. But I would point out that > > I have been intensively using and supporting languages that provide this > > feature > > for 40 years and have never seen it. > > In your first post, you said that there were no languages at all > that supported units as a language feature, and suggested that Python > should lead the way here: > > I find it a little shocking that no programming languages offer this > feature yet > > Now you say you've been using these "languages" plural for forty years. > Would you like to rephrase your claim? I am unable to reconcile the > discrepency. > > (There are three languages that I know of that support units as a first > class language feature, RPL, Frink and Fortress. None of them are 40 > years old.) > > > > -- > Steve > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list > Python-ideas@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
