Frink

I've had to implement unit math recently for CalcuLaTeX [0] and it's given me a lot of appreciation for how difficult it actually is. I've got it almost completely working with SI units but I haven't thought through fractional unit powers yet.

I really should've based it on something like GNU units.

[0] https://github.com/mkhan45/CalcuLaTeX

That almost works verbatim in GNU units (TNT must be made lowercase, and natural_gas’ underscore must be removed, not including “Advanced Farting” which IIUC would require editing a definition file): http://ix.io/2UMx

So for basic conversions like that, Fink isn’t worth reaching outside of my package manager (and I don’t want to use a web interface, I want a light, portable CLI tool). What I do find interesting is the date/time math (https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/#DateTimeHandling, that and maybe the text translation https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/#TextTranslation). I can use GNU date for some basic stuff, eg.…

  # 2001-08-12 04:00 UTC #

can become

  date -d'2001-08-12 04:00 UTC'

…but IIUC date is too dumb to take something like `# 6:00 PM Bosnia #` and assume today, or do math like `#2002-12-25# - now[] -> days`. I’ve previously ended up resorting to fairly ugly shell like `units -t $(( $(date +%s) - $(date -d '2002-12-25' +%s) ))seconds days`. I feel like I’m missing some useful units or date feature … or maybe I should use qalculate or python or something? (IDK, I need to sleep now, sorry if this sleepy comment is dumb)