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From: Fraser Wilson <newsfraser@blancolioni.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Safe Ada Unit Handling -- Macks 0.1
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2002 12:34:48 +0200
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Date: 2002-06-05T10:33:19+00:00
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Macks is a physical units preprocessor.  Given a set of fundamental 
units, and other units derived from them, Macks produced Ada package 
specfications and bodies which implement these relationships in a 
type-safe way.

New features for this version:

   - cartesian vectors, generated as records or arrays with arbitrary 
indexes/element names.
   - vector operations: addition, subtraction, dot product, and cross 
product if the vector is three dimensional.
   - unit subtypes
   - user header insertion
   - new operator: Unit / Unit -> Scalar
   - cosmetic fixes
   - source re-organisation and a Makefile
   - a manual!

You can grab it from

http://www.blancolioni.org/ada/macks/macks-0.1-src.tar.gz
or http://www.blancolioni.org/ada/macks/macks-0.1-src.zip

If you don't have texinfo installed, remove the 'doc' target from the 
top of the Makefile, and read the guide at 
http://www.blancolioni.org/ada/macks/macks.html instead.

I'm not entirely convinced that Macks solves anything other than a 
theoretical problem; in other words, it's a possiblility that without 
Macks you could write erroneous code and never know, but I wonder if 
this actually happens.  In any case, it can no longer be said that C++ 
has a resonable compile time implementation of typed units and Ada 
doesn't, which was really the point for me :-)

cheers,
Fraser.