heisenbugltd / si_units Goto Github PK

I have no idea what's going on, but the ubuntu-lts and debian-stable images get stuck in the compilation.

Currently we treat a duration the same way as any other unit. While this is fine for duration values less than 1000 seconds or so, it easily becomes unusual, or even unreadable once we start prefixing seconds to express kilo seconds or even Mega seconds (i.e. 1 hour would be expressed as 3.6 ks, one day is 86.4 ks, and one year is about 31.5 Ms). Though technically correct this is not how humans usually express such values.

If you specify Aft => 0 in the Image subprograms, it prints "0.6 " instead of the expected "600 m", because even with Aft = 0, there is at least one digit after the decimal point.

• Problem
  Right now, SI_Units uses strings encoded in iso-8859-1 (i.e. Ada.Characters.Latin_1), which is fine for most purposes. One drawback is that we do not support the Ohm-sign (i.e. Greek Letter Omega). This can be worked around by simply providing your own unit name when instantiating any of the Image functions.

• Proposed solution
  It would be nice to directly support UTF-8 encoded character strings in SI_Units.Names and subsequent use.

• Implementation effort
  The actual string concatenation within the library is agnostic to the string content itself, so the whole change should in effect be just be a matter of declaring the returned string as Ada.Strings.UTF_Encoding.UTF_8_String to declare the intent and adding the changing the string used for the Ohm symbol in SI_Units.Names.

• Expected impact
  Mostly documenation, library users should be made aware that the encoding is generally UTF-8. As this is a subtype of String, no code compatibility issues to previous versions are expected.