I'm super interested how you can do this in C++. Say, I need aggregate struct with a few 16 and 32 bit fields, some are little endian and some big endian. I do not want C++ to let me mix up endianness. How do I do it?
C++: That, but with a billion operator overloads and conversion operators so they feel just like native integers.
Of course you can use a unit type that handles conversions AND mathematical operations. Feet to meter cubed and you get m³, and the library will throw a compile error if you try to assign it to anything it doesn't work with (liters would be fine, for example)
News flash, C++ has every conceivable feature, it's the reason why it is so unwieldy. But you can even plug in a fucking GC if you so desire. Let alone stuff like basic meta programming.
> Feet to meter cubed and you get m³, and the library will throw a compile error if you try to assign it to anything it doesn't work with (liters would be fine, for example)
Liters would not be fine if you are using standard floating point values since you lose precision moving decimal points in some cases. Maybe for your application the values are such that this doesn't matter, but without understanding your problem in depth you cannot make the generic statement.
I could write books (I won't but I could) on all the compromises and trade offs in building a unit type library.
The 'explicit' would force you to use static_cast
And as usual, it mostly comes with zero overhead, beyond optional runtime range checking and unit conversions.
But C++ is a meta-programming language. Making up your own types with full operator overloading and implicit and explicit conversions is rather easy.
And the ADA feature of automatically selecting a suitable type under the hood isn't actually that useful, since computers don't really handle that many basic types on a hardware level. (And just to be clear, C++ templates can do the same either way)