R help - Dec 2011 - Representation of scientific units

Has anyone got a neat way in R to handle scientific units along with numeric
vectors?  e.g. in mathematica, there is a Units package to allow you to
do the following:

    85 Meter/Second * 10 Second 

answer: 850 Meter

   (taken from http://library.wolfram.com/howtos/units/)

Thanks, Stephen

On Dec 8, 2011, at 9:22 AM, Stephen Eglen wrote:
> Has anyone got a neat way in R to handle scientific units along with  
> numeric
> vectors?
Not really. There is limited support for conversions as well. I have  
wondered about this after addressing a similar question on Stack  
Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7214781/converting-units-in-r/7215430#7215430
>  e.g. in mathematica, there is a Units package to allow you to
> do the following:
>
>    85 Meter/Second * 10 Second
>
> answer: 850 Meter
As a program that was originally design to symbolic algebra it is not  
surprising to find such methods in Mathematica. I have looked around  
for examples of implementations in other languages and have found them  
in LisP and in PERL

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/units.html

http://search.cpan.org/~klortho/Physics-Unit-0.04/lib/Physics/Unit.pm

>
>   (taken from http://library.wolfram.com/howtos/units/)
-- 

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT