Conversion of Units of Measurement
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
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The metric system of measurement is the primary standard in all countries except the USA and two others. Use of the metric system is becoming more important to the USA for trade and commerce in the world economy. A metric conversion program was developed to convert 350 measurement units between inch-pound (or USA customary) and metric systems for engineering design and documentation. The program follows the primary national metric standard with its conversion factors and special rules for arithmetic, rounding, accuracy, formatting, and terminology. It was first developed in APL on a VM CMS mainframe system, but subsequent demand warranted a PC version. The program has been presented at national metric meetings and is briefly described here.The portability of APL2 under VM CMS and PC DOS was exploited in moving the mainframe program to the PC, maintaining much of the code in identical form, thus giving advantages in testing, verification, and user experience. Differences between the environments fell mainly in the user and file interface areas, which led to a matched set of cover functions for system dependent operations. These functions and differences between the two systems are described for file operations, pop-up windows, printing, stack and host system commands.The capability and portability of APL enabled this application to become the first internally written example at this company of IBM's new user interface guidelines working on both a central mainframe and a PC.