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From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C strongly typed?
Message-ID: <6475@bd.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 90 21:01:15 GMT
References: <259@eiffel.UUCP) <1990Mar1.172526.28683@utzoo.uucp) <849@enea.se) <1990Mar7.182230.5517@utzoo.uucp) <862@enea.se> <39941@ism780c.isc.com> <3744@tukki.jyu.fi> <3965@nmtsun.nmt.edu>
Reply-To: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 43

In article <3965@nmtsun.nmt.edu> al@nmtsun.nmt.edu (Al Stavely) writes:
>In article <3744@tukki.jyu.fi> sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) writes:
>>In article <39941@ism780c.isc.com> marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein) writes:
>>>I did read a paper (sorry, I don't have the reference) describing a language
>>>that allowed one to augment the the type declaration with a units declaration
>>>so as to be able to catch errors of this form.
>>
>>I think there has been more than one article in ACM SIGPLAN Notices
>>during the last two or three years that has suggested such a language
>>extension (to Pascal at least) in considerable detail.
>
>
>This is a moderately good but totally obvious idea, and language constructs
>for doing this have been re-invented over and over again.  It's just that
>no one has thought it significant enough to incorporate into a major language.

Well, I know of a minor programming language that allows one to
achieve most of what is required at a fairly low cost in language
feature overhead.  The concepts and their rationale are explained
in the "Rationale for the Design of the Ada programming language",
sections 7.2 and 7.3.  Examples there of types with implied units
are FRANC and MARK, DOLLAR and CENT, LENGTH and AREA.  You might
want to look it up.

hit n now, rest is junk to massage some bloody fool's ego

sorry
i
have
to
include
more
new
text
than
quoted
text
so
wasting
your
time
and
money