
The Units package is a collection of modules for parsing strings with
unit measurements (such as "12pt" or "3 meters") and converting them
to some other unit (such as "picas" or "inches").

The current distribution contains the following packages:

    Units::Base		- a base module that does all of the work
    Units::Length		- a module for converting units of length
    Units::Type		- a module for converting units of type

Units::Base by itself does nothing. Another module needs to use it
to create definitions of what units of measurement it handles and
how they are related to each other (ie, 1 m = 100 cm).

The base unit also allows for synonym and abbreviations to be
defined.

It also allows common "multiples" to be defined, so that it can
handle things like "18 half-points" or "6 dozen feet" or even
convert millimters to "sixteenths of an inch". (It does not yet
handle Greek prefixes like centi- or mega- ... those will have
to be manually defined.)

Required Modules:

    Carp

Author:

    Robert Rothenberg <wlkngowl@unix.asb.com>

Notes:

The current release should be considered "beta" until further testing
and refinements have been made.

Obvious additions would be modules for converting between units of
area, volume, weight, ...

For what it's worth, I originally wrote this module to convert between
typographical measurements (so that one could specify "1 pica" or "12
points" interchangably).  It makes too much sense not to generalize the
module for other measurement conversions.

Note that it makes little sense to include all units of a length in one
module: there's little use to convert "light-years" into "barleycorns".
Specialized systems deserve their own modules, such as ::Astronomy,
::Chemistry, or Units::Textile....

I am proposing the following organization for modules (actually writing
these modules is left as a project for other authors...):

    Units
      ::Length		- general measures of length
        ::Chinese		- specialized regional/traditional systems
        ::English
      ::Area
      ::Volume
      ::Astronomy
        ::Length		- or Distance...?

The only stipulation would be that all modules for converting between
units of length share a common unit (such as meters) to that they can
be translated.


