On 07/07/2016 20:52, Van Snyder wrote:
> This is almost exactly what's in the proposal, except the tag is on the
> variable declaration instead of its appearance as an actual argument,
> and the processor will probably represent and check it only at compile
> time.
Van
My apologies for having partly misunderstood your proposal - I have to
confess I skimmed some of the 49-pages. But since the I/O facilities
do require automatic conversion and some sort of convention for units
that other users can adopt (or not)? And these, therefore, require
some code generation. So why not extend that to automatic conversion in
expressions and assignments? Not that I'm arguing for that: it would
be nice to have of course, but it seems just to darned complicated to be
feasible.
Another advantage of having the tag on the actual argument is that it
allows expressions in the actual arguments of procedure calls, like
call some_trig_function( my_angle_in_degs * pi/180.0[rads])
which your proposal for tagging the variables at the declaration point
seems not to allow. That seems a pity, and might lead to a bit of code
bloat. But maybe that's something else that I didn't understand properly?
Regards
--
Clive Page
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