Don Taylor wrote:

> I had even more extreme ideas on paper. One simple one was that
> most programming languages don't really provide an environment where
> dimensions and units of measure are supported.  I had described a
> language where that might have caught the errors that resulted in
> the failures of the european satellite launch and the mars lander.

There have been a number of language attempts to address the issue of
user defined dimensions and automated conversions. The problem often
breaks down to to what is the reference units and conversion to different
units measuring the same thing.

For example a program that  measures an object in mm's and prints
the result in inches. Among other things methods in object oriented
languages were expected to solve this type of problem. Languages like
logo have the potential to deal with this type of problem fairly cleanly.

There are some additional data structs needed for the general case. The
automotive industry uses a lot of 7200 element circular data types. In
a semi-automated way these structures are indexed both by time and
angle by the processors that support engine controllers.

w..



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