[Python-ideas] SI scale factors in Python

[M.-A. Lemburg]

I've been following this discussion on and off for a while, but
still fail to see how SI units, factors or the like are a use
case which is general enough to warrant changing the language.

There are packages available on PyPI for dealing with this
in a similar way we deal with decimal literals in Python:

C extension:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cfunits/
http://pythonhosted.org/cfunits/cfunits.Units.html
(interfaces to the udunits-2 lib:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/udunits/udunits-2.2.20/doc/udunits/udunits2.html)

Pure python:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/units/

IMHO, a literal notation like "2 m" is more likely related to
a missing operator which should be flagged as SyntaxError
than the declaration of an integer with associated unit.
By keeping such analysis to string to object conversion
tools/functions you make the intent explicit, which
allows for better error reporting.

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