Programming Pascal with Physical Units

Abstract

In /Mä86/ (SIGPLAN Notices 3/1986) Männer proposes an extension of Pascal permitting the use of physical units in programs. We discuss his issues in this paper and describe our own somewhat different approach. Our language extension PHYSCAL of Pascal not merely satisfies the requirements suggested by /Mä86/, but also supports predefined units (International Standard), thorough realisation of the concept of scale factors, input/output facilities for numbers with units. The new concepts are motivated, and the language description is given formally and by examples. Finally we discuss some details of the realised language implementation by a PHYSCAL-to-Pascal preprocessor in an UNIX environment. © 1986, ACM. All rights reserved.