Measurement Units in R
Edzer J Pebesma, Thomas Mailund, James Hiebert · The R Journal · 2016
We briefly review SI units, and discuss R packages that deal with measurement units, their compatibility and conversion.Built upon udunits2 and the UNIDATA udunits library, we introduce the package units that provides a class for maintaining unit metadata.When used in expression, it automatically converts units, and simplifies units of results when possible; in case of incompatible units, errors are raised.The class flexibly allows expansion beyond predefined units.Using units may eliminate a whole class of potential scientific programming mistakes.We discuss the potential and limitations of computing with explicit units.