SLE 2018
Sun 4 - Fri 9 November 2018 Boston, Massachusetts, United States
co-located with SPLASH 2018
Tue 6 Nov 2018 11:00 - 11:30 at Studio 1 - Types & Constraints Chair(s): Ralf Laemmel

In scientific applications, physical quantities and units of measurement are used regularly. If the inherent incompatibility between these units is not handled properly it can lead to major, and sometimes catastrophic, problems. Although the risk of a miscalculation is high and the cost equally so, almost none of the major programming languages has support for physical quantities. Instead, scientific code developers often make their own tools or rely on external libraries to help them spot or prevent these mistakes.

We employed a systematic approach to examine and analyse all available physical quantity open-source libraries. The search results were then condensed into 82 libraries, chosen from approximately 3700 search results across seven repository hosting sites, as being the most comprehensive and well-developed. In this group, 30 different programming languages are represented. Out of these 82 libraries, 38 have been updated within the last two years. These 38 are summarised in this paper as they are deemed the most relevant.

The conclusion we draw from these results is that there is clearly too much diversity, duplicated efforts, a lack of code sharing and harmonisation to encourage use.

Unlike Landin~\cite{landin700} we are not proposing an ISWIM for unit descriptions but emphasising the need to create a standard application interface for unit libraries to encourage adoption, especially within the scientific programming community.

Tue 6 Nov

Displayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change

10:30 - 12:00
Types & ConstraintsSLE 2018 at Studio 1
Chair(s): Ralf Laemmel Facebook London
10:30
30m
Talk
Constraint-based Run-time State Migration for Live Modeling
SLE 2018
Ulyana Tikhonova CWI, Jouke Stoel CWI, Tijs van der Storm CWI & University of Groningen, Thomas Degueule Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
11:00
30m
Talk
The Next 700 Unit Checkers
SLE 2018
Oscar Bennich-Björkman Uppsala University, Steve McKeever Uppsala University
11:30
30m
Talk
A Practical Type System for Safe Aliasing
SLE 2018
Dimi Racordon University of Geneva, Centre Universitaire d'Informatique, Geneva, Switzerland, Didier Buchs University of Geneva, Centre Universitaire d'Informatique, Geneva, Switzerland