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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

you would define values like

   weight = unit("10 kg")
   speed = unit("2.5 furlong per week")

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My imaginary units library would have been like

    Unit(float, unit_as_string)

The free text version is pretty cool though

I would parse the free text version into something like your version. It could be used for user input from a text input field or the command line.

But what does strings have to do with it? Why can't those expressions be plain Perl, maybe with some overloaded operators?

For example,

    import week, custom, si, type from stdlib.units
    weight = 10 * si.kg
    speed = 2.5 * (custom("furlong", type.LENGTH) / week)

this is also important - but imo, and in practice from perl5, the Units library experience is a lot richer if you can do both - especially for entry level programmers such as high school students - more on this to come in v2

Even further, presumably things like kg·m·s⁻², which (perhaps) this library can equate to Newtons.

this works now x for input and output ... the challenge for this kind of thing in bare code is that you need a LOT of namespace ... .oO maybe override the dot?

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