Re: [boost] Units of data

Subject: Re: [boost] Units of data
From: Zachary Turner (divisortheory_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-07-02 16:13:28

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Steven Watanabe<watanabesj_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> AMDG
>
> Zachary Turner wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for your help so far!  I know I'm probably just making this too
>> difficult, but it's still not working.  I guess I should just post a
>> complete sample so that we can eliminate the snip factor from the list
>> of possible causes  (I put them in the boost namespace for the sake of
>> consistency but the same problem arises regardless).
>>
>> <snip>
>>  void foo()
>> {
>>        using boost::units::quantity;
>>        using namespace boost::units::data_capacity;
>>
>>        //Both of these fail with the message that there is no
>> conversion to the destination
>>        //type because the construcor is explicit
>>        quantity<data_capacity> compressed_size = 1000 * bytes;
>>        quantity<data_capacity, int> compressed_size2 = 1000 * bytes;
>>
>
> Implicit conversion between different units is not allowed.
> Try
> quantity<data_capacity> compressed_size(1000 * bytes);

Thanks.  The confusion came from the fact that the syntax I was trying
was being used in some of the examples.  But there is something
different about those examples, so that's why it wasn't working.  One
of the trig examples has a line:

quantity<plane_angle>           theta = 0.375*radians;

for example.   I suppose it's due to the fact that radians are the
"primary" unit for this dimension?

That aside, I still think something isn't exactly right.  Ultimately I
need to be able to print these quantities in different units (for
example, if I'm transferring data at 100MB/s I don't want to print
this in bits / second).  All of these seems to only allow printing of
a quantity in its base unit, which here is defined to be bits.  I'd
like to be able to do something like:

quantity<capacity> q = 2180321.0 * bytes;
std::cout << q * megabytes << std::endl;

or slightly more complicated,

quantity<capacity> q = 1.432 * gigabytes;
quantity<time> t = 1.5 * hours;
std::cout << (q/t) * (megabytes/minute) << std::endl;
std::cout << (q/t) * (kilobytes/second) << std::endl;

and have it print:

2.07931614 MB for the first example,

and

16.2929778 MB / minute
278.066821 KB / second

for the second example

It seems like this should "just work" since I've defined them all as
scaled based units, but instead the first example just prints

1.74426e+007 b MB

which means all its doing is formatting it as bits and then appending "MB".

Is this possible short of making one system for each type I want to
convert between?