Representation of scientific units
On Dec 8, 2011, at 9:22 AM, Stephen Eglen wrote:
Has anyone got a neat way in R to handle scientific units along with numeric vectors?
Not really. There is limited support for conversions as well. I have wondered about this after addressing a similar question on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7214781/converting-units-in-r/7215430#7215430
e.g. in mathematica, there is a Units package to allow you to do the following: 85 Meter/Second * 10 Second answer: 850 Meter
As a program that was originally design to symbolic algebra it is not surprising to find such methods in Mathematica. I have looked around for examples of implementations in other languages and have found them in LisP and in PERL http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/units.html http://search.cpan.org/~klortho/Physics-Unit-0.04/lib/Physics/Unit.pm
(taken from http://library.wolfram.com/howtos/units/)
David Winsemius, MD West Hartford, CT