Quantity Checking through Unit of Measurement Libraries, Current Status and Future Directions

Steve McKeever, Görkem Paçaci, Oscar Bennich-Björkman

2019

Abstract

Unit errors are known to have caused some costly software engineering disasters, most notably the Mars Climate Orbiter back in 1999. As unit annotations are not mandatory for execution only dramatic events become newsworthy. Anecdotally however, there is evidence to suggest that these kinds of errors are recurrent and under-reported. There are an abundance of tools and most notably libraries to aid scientific developers manage unit definitions. In this paper we look in detail at how a number of prominent libraries in the most popular programming languages support units. We argue that even when these libraries are based on a sound design pattern, their implementation becomes too broad. Each library is distinct with varying features, lacking a core API, compromising both interoperability and thereby usage. We claim that further library or tool development is not needed to further adoption, but that a greater understanding of developers requirements is.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

McKeever S., Paçaci G. and Bennich-Björkman O. (2019). Quantity Checking through Unit of Measurement Libraries, Current Status and Future Directions.In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD, ISBN 978-989-758-358-2, pages 443-449. DOI: 10.5220/0007524704430449

in Bibtex Style

@conference{modelsward19,
author={Steve McKeever and Görkem Paçaci and Oscar Bennich-Björkman},
title={Quantity Checking through Unit of Measurement Libraries, Current Status and Future Directions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,},
year={2019},
pages={443-449},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007524704430449},
isbn={978-989-758-358-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,
TI - Quantity Checking through Unit of Measurement Libraries, Current Status and Future Directions
SN - 978-989-758-358-2
AU - McKeever S.
AU - Paçaci G.
AU - Bennich-Björkman O.
PY - 2019
SP - 443
EP - 449
DO - 10.5220/0007524704430449