Speaker
Description
Most quantities in the physical world are associated with a unit of measurement. Thus, keeping track of the units and dimensions of a quantity is an important part of scientific computing. Yet, enforcing type checking in computer code is still not a universal practice. This is partly due to limitations of the programming environments. Often, software packages exist which support basic arithmetic operations with units of measurement, but not more advanced operations like linear algebra and differential equations.
We explain how the ecosystem around DifferentialEquations in the Julia programming language supports solving ODEs with units of measurements. Addressing the shortcomings of the current options, we introduce a novel array type compatible with the existing ecosystem. Finally, we discuss remaining challenges and possible further directions for unit-checked scientific computing.