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Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 15:34:26 -0400
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Darren New wrote:
> Can someone explain why a combinatoric explosion of types is bad

Several reasons. First of all, someone has to write them. Second,
the set of possible units is infinite, so declaring all of the
types and operations is impossible; you can only declare the
subset that you think anyone will ever need, and if you're wrong,
the extra ones will have to be done by the users. Third, it feels
inelegant to have to do this - in the real world, units systems
such as SI consist only of a small number of fundamental units
and all the rest are composed of those. One would hope that this
could be captured by the programming.