Caleçon is both a calculator and a converter of measurement units. While converting Caleçon's code to Free Pascal, I was pleased to find that its run time library contains Delphi compatible units convutils and stdconvs. Unfortunately, both units contain a few errors. Initially, I opted to write my own conversion unit. Lately, I have decided to attempt to fix the Free Pascal code and hope to eventually submit these corrections for inclusion in a future version of the compiler.

The most obvious problem was that conversion between temperatures measured in Celsius and Fahrenheit were incorrect. Other conversions were missing and a couple were wrong.

It turned out that the interface part of the original file had the correct structures to handle non linear conversions such as between degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit but they were not used in the implementation part. Accordingly the implementation part is much changed. I also added some procedures and functions found in recent versions of the Delphi units.

The archive rtl-conversion.zip contains the projected changes to convutils and stdconvs along with two demonstration programs and unit tests. To avoid problems with the original RTL files, the new files are named mdconvutils.pp, its include file mdconvutil.inc and mdstdconvs.pp. The unit tests do not cover the conversion routines in mdstdconvs.pp.

The conversion between TDateTime and Julian dates and modified Julian dates does not work. After some experimentation, I ascertained that the problem was in two routines, DateTimeToJulianDate TryJulianDateToDateTime, found in the dateutils unit. Turns out that the conversion is done for days, excluding any fractions of a day. I have raised a ticket in the Free Pascal bugtracker and hopefully a correction will be applied shortly.

In the meantime, the errors can be seen by comparing the results obtained with dateconversion (download the archive dateconversion.zip) with those from a reputable conversion site such as NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. If the checkbox Use corrected functions is checked then functions with my proposed corrections will be used instead of those in dateutils.