2012/4/4 Richard Eisenberg
- A first crack at units in Haskell has already been done (by Bjorn Buckwalter) and made public at http://code.google.com/p/dimensional/ This implementation uses functional dependencies heavily and is restricted to only a specific 7 units.
I am a happy user of the type family variant of the dimensional package [1]. It can represent all possible dimensions in the type system by encoding them as powers of 7 base dimensions. It supports all SI units and a few non-SI units. One of the limitations of this approach is that you can not make a distinction between absolute and relative units (degree Celsius vs Kelvin). I found the wikipedia page on dimensional analysis [2] to present a good overview of the problem space. I share Gregory Collins' question on how your work would differ from the dimensional package, or what it would add. 1 - https://github.com/bjornbm/dimensional-tf 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis