Getting value of TIME STEP while leaving out its unit

[MarvinK]

Hello all,

I have a small request to which I have unfortunately not yet found a solution.

There are cases in which dividing or multiplying by the TIME STEP is helpful in assigning a time unit to a variable and thereby avoiding unit errors.

Example: I want to determine total cost of all annual public transport subscriptions. The annual subscriptions could be given in persons/year and costs per subscription in dollars/person/year. Total cost of all subscriptions would then be determined by subscriptions*subscription cost. To assign a time unit to the total cost of all subscriptions I multiply by the TIME STEP. That leads to subscriptions*subscription cost*TIME STEP.

However, if TIME STEP is not 1, actual cost of all subscriptions would be changed. Therefore, I again divide by the absolute value of the TIME STEP: subscriptions*subscription cost*TIME STEP/(1/32) (if TIME STEP = 1/32).

My question is whether there is a more elegant solution to this. In most cased, TIME STEP is probably not changed. So it shouldn’t be a problem having “1/32” as a fixed value in the equation. However, is there a way of getting the absolute value of the TIME STEP and leaving out its unit? With TIME STEP/TIME STEP time reference would be shortened directly.

I'm really looking forward to your responses!

Best wishes,
Marvin

[Administrator]

I'm not sure you have the units specified correctly.

Are you sure "costs per subscription" has the correct unit? I'd say it should be "dollar/person" (or dollar/subscription). Or maybe have a stock of "current subscribers" (people) and multiply that by the subscription cost per year?

Multiplying by time step to avoid unit errors is really not the correct thing to do.

[tomfid]

I agree with Tony's assessment - subscriptions seems like a stock, with units of people (or person*years/person).

However, there are certainly legitimate uses for the kind of conversion you're requesting. I would normally just create a "unit year" variable with the appropriate units, and make it an unchangeable constant.