Am 04.04.2012 13:48, schrieb Jurriën Stutterheim:
This sounds pretty cool and useful. How much of this can be implemented in a
library and how much of this would need to be supported on a compiler level?
Ideally, most of this would be solved on the library level.
The compiler would have to know how to "typecheck" units, e.g. the
addition (+) would combine two values of the same unit, the (/)
operation would divide them:
(+) :: <a> -> <a> -> <a>
(/) :: <a> -> <b> -> <a/b>
The idea is to have the compiler complain whenever you try to add <b> to
<a> or if you expect something other than <a/b> as result from a
division. This would require modifications to GHC at compiler level. A
library could offer some basic units (SI units for example) and maybe
even unit aliases ("<N> = <kg*m/s^2>"), but I don't see how the "core"
of this "unit verification system" could be placed into a library.
- Nils
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