Frontier

Using Frontier

Extending Frontier

adding favicons

migrating websites

Using CSS

Fixing Radio 8.1

Fixing Frontier 5

nextPrev broken

err log sans timestamp

temperature conversion

our WebRing

Tuesday 26 July 2005

It's frustrating being in a metric-phobic country. Whenever we travel I find that metric temperatures just make sense. Readers from all over visit these pages, and to make life just a wee bit easier, I wrote a small script to provide temperatures in my narrative in both Farenheit and Celcius, and in the same precision. Here's some examples of the script in action:

Bowing to the logic that the contextually appropriate temperature scale should appear first, with the conversion following, I require only a value an a scale, so an American can write I have a fever; it's 98.6° F (37.0° C), whereas pretty much everyone else would say ... 37° C (98° F).

The function looks like this

{temp(98.6, "F")}

and here's how it's implemented:

on temp( value, scale = "F" ) {
	«
	«Do the conversion mathematics
	«
	local {
		result  = 0.0;
		oldScale, newScale, h, answer, precision};
	if ( scale == "f" ) {
		scale = "F"};
	if ( scale == "F") {
		result = (value - 32) * (5.0 / 9.0);
		oldScale = "F";
		newScale = "C"}
	else {
		result = (value * (9.0 / 5.0)) + 32;
		oldScale = "C";
		newScale = "F"};
	«
	«Generate output that has at most the number of decimal places as the input.
	«
	dotPosition = string.PatternMatch( ".", value );
	if ( dotPosition == 0 ) {
		precision = -1}
	else {
		precision = string.length(value) - dotPosition};
	answer = string.mid( result, 0, string.patternMatch( ".", result ) + precision );
	h = value + "° " + oldScale + " (" + answer + "° " + newScale + ")";
	return( h )};

I hope you have as much fun with this as I do. It's nice to strike a blow for learning "that other system"...