"I think relation-arithmetic important, not only as an interesting generalization, but because it supplies a symbolic technique required for dealing with structure. It has seemed to me that those who are not familiar
Right. There is a long history of dimensions as after-thought/addon to languages going back to the PLATO system's TUTOR programming language circa 1972. Russell's Relation Arithmetic starts with relational structure and defines equivalence classes of structure as numbers in the arithmetic of relations. Its an entirely different, and correct, approach.
Relation Arithmetic and Dimensional Analysis (Score:2)
The penultimate paper of "Bit-string Physics: A Finite and Discrete Approach to Natural Philosophy" [google.com] discusses an attempted revival of "Relation Arithmetic" [boundaryinstitute.org] with which Russell and Whitehead had planned to cap off their Principia Mathematica in its final volume.
Of Relation Arithmetic, Russel said:
Re: (Score:0)
Look into strongly/statically typed languages with type inference (e.g.: Haskell, Idris, Agda, ML).
example [haskell.org]
Re:Relation Arithmetic and Dimensional Analysis (Score:2)
Right. There is a long history of dimensions as after-thought/addon to languages going back to the PLATO system's TUTOR programming language circa 1972. Russell's Relation Arithmetic starts with relational structure and defines equivalence classes of structure as numbers in the arithmetic of relations. Its an entirely different, and correct, approach.