I still have uses for Durations. For instance, I want to dispatch a different .Stringy method to Durations than to Nums. It's convenient to me that the difference between two Instants has a different type than the difference between 1654321681.123 and 1654321021.65438.
I just think Durations should be Liskov substitutable for Rats. I don't give any credence at all to the school of thought that the language designer can think of every legitimate mathematical operation for the difference between two instants. But I still want to use the type system to do MMD. Cheers, Mason On Nov 17, 2010, at 08:56 AM, Carl Mäsak wrote: > Mark (>): >> I'm not convinced that the type system shouldn't be helping with >> dimensional analysis, but at least it shouldn't hurt. By all means, >> let the programmer raise a Duration to a power - but the type of the >> result should not also be Duration. In the absence of automatic >> dimension tracking, just return a plain number. > > Or, by Ockham, since Duration is now deprived of its only task -- > making life harder for the programmer -- remove it altogether from the > language and just put a number type in its place, representing number > of seconds. > > // Carl