Millimeters in boost::units

Question

I want to use boost::units for some SI metrics. However our code mostly deals with millimeters and instead of using

quantity value = 1*milli*m         


        

Answer 1

C++11 is indeed the easiest solution. You could do

static const auto millimeter = milli * meter;

or

auto operator"" _mm (long double val) -> decltype(val * milli * meter)
{
     return val * milli * meter;
}

There should be no performance penalty as long as you are not converting to other prefixes. And even if you do it should be neglible.

If you don't want to use C++11 you'd need to find out the corresponding type of the expression milli * meter, though you could just replace auto by int and read the compiler message.