On Thu, Apr 07, 2022 at 11:18:57PM -0000, Brian McCall wrote: > > What does it *really* matter which of these you write? > > > that's just arguing over the colour of the bikeshed. > > > you have shown nothing to justify why unit support must be built > > into the language itself. > > I did what I could, but I'm not going to try and justify any more.
But that's my point, you haven't tried to justify why units need to be built-in to the language except to declare that they must and that a library won't cut it. I'm sympathetic to that view, but "Trust me, I'm right!" is not going to sway the core developers or the Steering Council. You're a scientist, think of this as a grant proposal. Convince us. > At the end of the day, units are a core part of science and > engineering. There are many things which are core to science and engineering but aren't part of the core Python language. What makes units of measurements more special than, say, numpy arrays or dataframes? The numpy/scipy/pandas stack is HUGE in scientific Python, and it is not built into the language. nltk is a very big, powerful library used for computational linguistics, and its not built into the core language. If there is something critical in units that requires core language support, what is it? > Scientists and engineers are freaking passionate about > units. More and more of them are also being expected to write code to > do their jobs. To me that says it's going to happen at some point. People have been talking about unifying units into programming languages since the 1970s, in Fortran and Pascal. Ada has had support for measurement units since at least 2003 and probably earlier. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-44947-7_19 (Sorry, not a free link.) Both F# (2005) and Swift (2014) also support units in the core language. I've also mentioned Frink, and HP calculator "RPL" language supports units. HP has supported them since the mid 1980s. Java, C++, C#, Javascript, Ruby and others all have units libraries. Quote: "These types of libraries do already exist, several hundreds in fact. The problem thus is not the lack of these solutions but the opposite that they are so numerous that it is hard to get an overview." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/spe.2926 So for scientists who want units of measurement support, there are many existing solutions they can use today. Why are those solutions insufficient, and what can be done about it? -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/B2HZEPSMKIT4BNLAI7O6TTALBEMXUL3C/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
