

F# to get units types - mark_h
http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewkennedy/archive/2008/08/20/units-of-measure-in-f-part-one-introducing-units.aspx

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baha_man
So was the problem with the Mars Climate Orbiter caused by mixing up 'English'
or Imperial units with metric units?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_unit>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units>

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teamonkey
JPL developed the software and used 'English' units consistently, NASA
developed the Orbiter and used metric.

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baha_man
I'd never heard of 'English' units before, we call them Imperial.

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sah
More languages should have a facility for keeping track of units and doing
conversions, regardless of whether it's done in the type system or at runtime.

Making this a part of the type system seems a little strange to me. Obviously
it's nice to get warnings at compile-time or in the IDE. But I keep trying to
imagine how you might make a feature like this useful as a parameter to
strings, or a user-defined type, and with functions other than the arithmetic
operators.

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thwarted
Why are the code samples in images? I guess because they are intended to be
screenshots of the IDE, but it sure makes them look crappy if you have the
page zoomed.

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felixmar
I assume to show the type inference popups of Visual Studio. A better choice
would have been to use the CopySourceAsHtml add-in and only capture the popups
as images.

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DanielBMarkham
F# is prominent on my radar.

If they will fully optimize non-mutable structures and functions across
processors I think it's a game-changer for Microsoft. But having said that, it
might be five years before all the pieces come together.

It has a lot of promise.

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icey
In the past 3 or 4 years, Microsoft has really changed its stances on a lot of
things in terms of languages. Between the DLR and F#, it certainly makes me
mind working on .Net a little less.

I do wish Rich would resume support of Clojure on .Net, but I understand why
he chose to focus on the JVM alone.

