From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2008-11-15T03:55:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Unit Conversion (#183)



On Nov 14, 10:49 am, Matthew Moss <m...@moss.name> wrote:
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> ## Unit Conversion (#183)
>
> Google added a calculator to its search engine a while back. Enter  
> "convert 50 miles to kilometers", or even just "50 mi to km", and the  
> first "search" result will tell you that 50 miles is 80.4672  
> kilometers. This works for units other than length. Try "33 ml to  
> gal", "6 hours to minutes", and"50 stones to lbs", and you'll see that  
> Google's calculator knows a lot of different units and how to convert  
> between them all.
>
> Your task is to write a units converter script. The input to the  
> script must be three arguments: the quantity, the source units, and  
> the destination units. The first example above would be run like this:
>
>      $ ruby convert.rb 50 miles kilometers
>
> Or, using abbreviations:
>
>      $ ruby convert.rb 50 mi km
>
> Support as many units and categories of units (i.e. volume, length,  
> weight, etc.) as you can, along with appropriate abbreviations for  
> each unit.

This will be interesting. I'm not going to endeavor into myself b/c I
help maintain Stick (http://stick.rubyforge.org) which already does
this (and there's another lib out there that does it too). But it will
be interesting to see how others approach it.

Thanks,
T.