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From: Duncan Sands <baldrick@free.fr>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Dimensions and fixed point types
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 09:11:39 +0200
Organization: Cuivre, Argent, Or
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Date: 2004-06-09T09:11:39+02:00

Fixed point types have a remarkable property:
you can multiply any two of them to get a third.
You can multiply apples and oranges and get
bananas.  This goes against type safety.

Suppose I have several fixed point types, for
example

type Price is delta 0.01 digits ...;
type Volume is delta 1.0 digits ...;
type Value is delta 0.01 digits ...;

Then all possible multiplications are legal.  By
declaring some multiplications abstract, I can
remove unwanted operations, and just keep the
ones I want, for example Price * Volume = Value.
(This is already a lot of operations to remove!).

However if somewhere else I define

type Oranges is delta ... digits ...;

then I automagically get a whole bunch of new
operations (Orange * Value = Price etc) that I
don't want.  To be safe I'd need to remove them
all too - it is never ending.  This makes fixed point
types almost useless in a dimensions system, or
whenever you want to catch incorrect operations
based on type.

Maybe there is a trick I am missing though.  Can
anyone see a way to use fixed point types safely
in a setting where multiplying objects of the wrong
type would be fatal?

Also, why were things done this way?  It seems to
me that a much better approach would be to say
that multiplication between different fixed point types
is NOT automatically defined, but can be obtained
by writing something like this:

function "*" (Left : Apples; Right : Oranges) return Banana;
pragma Import (Intrinsic, "*");

Thanks for any comments,

Duncan.