Thank you everyone for your replies.
Initially I think I am going to role my own as my requirements
are fairly simple compared to a full blown system with units of
measure. My goal is to have large number of application specific
types which may be implemented as the same but are semantically
different.
A real world case in which I have used this approach was when
cleaning up a large body of code using a mixture of time units
(sec,msec,µsec) stored as 32 and 64bit signed and unsigned
integers. We needed to standardized on µsec and explicit typing
greatly simplified the migration process.
I have also worked on protects in the past where we speculated on
the benefits of using strong typing to avoid incorrect mixing of
matrices (world, model, bone etc.). I think there is allot of
value to be had in simply requiring explicit casting however I am
less convinced on systems that allow implicit combining of units
of the same quantity type. I feel part of the type is its range
and precision and so there is no valid way to implicitly add
kilometers to millimeters for example.
I hope that at some point support for the semantically different
versions of the same type will be added to the standard library
but for now I am happy to write my own. D is still a new language
to me and it has some vary nice features to help accomplish this.
