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How does GNU Units compare to Frink ( https://frinklang.org/ https://frinklang.org/ )?

by bjeds 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 6y ago
Units is older, frink is a lot bigger, it's a whole programming environment. Frink started from and extended the units defined by Units, I don't know if anything has gone in the other direction. Later: for simpler calculations an interesting feature frink adds is the ability to do interval arithmetic. Terms can be specified as ranges that are then carried through the calculations to the result.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Looks like it is comparable to javax.measure (https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=363 https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=363). I used an implementation of that a few years ago: https://github.com/unitsofmeasurement/uom-se https://github.com/unitsofmeasurement/uom-se It's a complex domain, especially if you get down to having more complex units composed of other units and want to do conversions between metric and imperial. In our case we were dealing with material properties (chemical, physical, magnetic, etc.) and different countries and companies using different ways to record characteristics for materials.
samatman 6y ago
The author of Frink takes particular pride in doing unit maths correctly. For example, if the conversion between two units is defined by statute to be some weird ratio, Frink will use that, and not merely the best f64 approximation of that ratio. As indicated by a sibling comment, Frink also handles interval maths, and in general it just has a remarkable amount of features, being a fully-fledged programming language. It's a pity it isn't open-source, the author says he doesn't want the aggravation of having to deal with pull requests and so on, and just wants to work on his software project on his own. Which, ok, that's fair: but at least Lua and SQLite don't accept contributions from outside the team, so there's a model for releasing open-source software without having to collaborate with the general public. No question that it would increase the size of his inbox though, so I get it.

How does GNU Units compare to Frink ( https://frinklang.org/ https://frinklang.org/ )?

by bjeds 6y ago

How does GNU Units compare to Frink ( https://frinklang.org/ https://frinklang.org/ )?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

maxerickson 6y ago

Units is older, frink is a lot bigger, it's a whole programming environment. Frink started from and extended the units defined by Units, I don't know if anything has gone in the other direction. Later: for simpler calculations an interesting feature frink adds is the ability to do interval arithmetic. Terms can be specified as ranges that are then carried through the calculations to the result.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Looks like it is comparable to javax.measure (https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=363 https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=363). I used an implementation of that a few years ago: https://github.com/unitsofmeasurement/uom-se https://github.com/unitsofmeasurement/uom-se It's a complex domain, especially if you get down to having more complex units composed of other units and want to do conversions between metric and imperial. In our case we were dealing with material properties (chemical, physical, magnetic, etc.) and different countries and companies using different ways to record characteristics for materials.

samatman 6y ago

The author of Frink takes particular pride in doing unit maths correctly. For example, if the conversion between two units is defined by statute to be some weird ratio, Frink will use that, and not merely the best f64 approximation of that ratio. As indicated by a sibling comment, Frink also handles interval maths, and in general it just has a remarkable amount of features, being a fully-fledged programming language. It's a pity it isn't open-source, the author says he doesn't want the aggravation of having to deal with pull requests and so on, and just wants to work on his software project on his own. Which, ok, that's fair: but at least Lua and SQLite don't accept contributions from outside the team, so there's a model for releasing open-source software without having to collaborate with the general public. No question that it would increase the size of his inbox though, so I get it.