On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 5:06 PM, Steve Hankin <Steven.C.Hankin at noaa.gov>wrote:
>
>
>
> P.S. Together with enhancing udunits to handle the formatting of
> date-time strings,it would be natural to add the same functionality for
> longitudes, too. Ditto degrees of temperature -- degrees F, C and K.
> Again -- the challenges of handling times are found in the other units, too
> (admittedly with less complexity and MUCH less baggage attached).
>
> I have to admit I extended udunits for perhaps these problems a long time
ago, but there was no way to get my changes back in the original code. I
added another component to the units structure so that it would keep track
of the direction, so that degrees_north and degrees_east were
distinguishable, and I was careful to distinguish between degree_Celsius (no
origin) and Celsius_scale (origin) (which is not a code change, just a
change in the .dat file that holds all the unit definitions to define terms
with clear meanings). As for time, I did define both seconds and years as
different physical units, but that was long before multiple calendars which
is the better solution.
I agree with Steve that we still need to discuss and debate the fundementals
-- the discussion so far would invalidate a lot of our current data files
for no particular reason.
Benno
--
Dr. M. Benno Blumenthal benno at iri.columbia.edu
International Research Institute for climate and society
The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Lamont Campus, Palisades NY 10964-8000 (845) 680-4450
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Received on Wed Mar 16 2011 - 17:22:47 GMT
