> }... units in LV is a unique experiment unlike what I've seen > }in other programming languages or engineering tools. It works > }incredibly well and efficiently for most things, but ... > > Bugs or no bugs, units has been a God-send to me, flagging my > attempts to get a force by multiplying a mass and a velocity, for > instance. > > The young'uns figure they'd never make such a stupid mistake but us > old codgers know we need all the protection we can get. And only > LabVIEW provides this one. Thanks, NI.
I guess that means there are very few young'uns out there. I agree that units is a cool tool. It takes a strict view of units, the way most of us were trained to use them, and forces us to use them consistently. Unfortunately, there are those apps that don't need/want this because they can be hooked to different sensors or mix data within a 2D array or some such thing, and they need a more dynamic system. Internally, we have made some progress on a system that will handle both, and keep hoping to find the TIME to work on it, but as with any of these features that people rely on, the validation time alone is pretty huge, not to mention that units run throughout execution and UI, touch typedefs, etc. And that is why I used this as an example of a bastion of bugs that are better off left cornered and documented until we can rearchitect the thing to try and resolve big problems and squash the slippery ones that seem to linger from release to release as if NI weren't interested in fixing them. If some poor fool were to run into that corner with a can of bug spray, they might kill one or two, but most of the bugs would just relocate to new parts of the LV building, and then the chore would be finding them again and figuring out how to work around them. Anyway, I personally think units are cool, and when they are rearchitected, I hope they can deal with significant figures as well since they we were all trained to treat them the same, at the same time in the process. Then we might end up with a few additional probes making it to Mars, or spending less time and gray hairs on the ones that do. Greg McKaskle
