On 04/04/2022 09.45, Ethan Furman wrote:
> On 4/3/22 11:52, Brian McCall wrote:
>
...
>> The old engineering disciplines- mine (civil engineering), structural,
> electrical, etc- are the next frontier in the
>> "software eats the world" revolution, and they desperately need a
> language with native units support. I was just on an
>> interview call yesterday for a senior engineer role at a large
> multinational earth works engineering firm and we spent
>> 15 minutes talking about software and what we see coming down the road
> when it comes to the need for our discipline to
>> grow in its software creation capabilities.
>>
...
It's not only 'engineering'. Although, the archetypical story ("learning
opportunity") is that of the space-craft software partly developed in
Europe and partly 'in-Imperial', resulting in a catastrophic navigation
error...
Many (many) years ago, I was part of a team developing a replacement
Inventory/Stock Control system. When 'problems' arose in the 'old
system', rather than fixing, the 'solution' was sometimes to rip-out the
problematic functionality - the new system will be ready 'soon'*. This
resulted in 'consequences'! One day, as the only prog who could work on
the mainframe's overnight-batch processes and the mini-computers running
the warehouses, I was asked to 'put back' the code dealing with
pack-sizes. Once done, a stock-take was necessary. I went out to a
warehouse to do some 'live testing' and was shown some of the "problems
we're facing". Sure-enough, a quick call-around and a
back-of-an-envelope calculation revealed that we had more than
sufficient stock - every man, woman, and child in the country could have
enjoyed a fresh toothbrush, every day, for several years.
Yes, they'd been ordering quantities in one pack-size, whereas the
supplier was delivering something (much) larger!
* see also 'the sound of deadlines':
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/douglas_adams_134151
You wouldn't believe it - have interrupted typing here to receive a
package. However, the clothing delivered is NOT the size ordered...
Recently, I've been struggling with graphics and thus using both
Cartesian- and Polar-coordinates. Worse are vectors (in both) which
cannot be easily distinguished. Just coping with the math is (more than)
enough for this limited brain, without also keeping-track of the
unit/convention!
How about 4/5/2022? Is that tomorrow's date or almost one-month away?
> How old are you? 35 years
> How much do you weigh? 300 kg
> What temperature do you cook bread at? 350 F
These look like input prompts, and responses.
Do you want to be able to accept different temporal formats, different
measures of weight, and different temperature units - from the same
input interaction?
How about writing sample Python code to accomplish this, eg
some_meaningful_identifier_here = input("How old are you? ")
or are you thinking:
class Weight():
...
weight = Weight(input(etc))
or some combination thereof,
or another approach,
or ...?
--
Regards,
=dn
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