Python: Converting from one temperature scale to another is easy, but what about eight?

Posted by tripwire45 on Oct 11, 2009 11:38 PM EDT
A Million Chimpanzees; By James Pyles
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In just about any class or set of tutorials involving beginning programming, there's usually a problem or set of problems having to do with converting temperatures. Just about everyone has had to write a wee bit of code to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius or vice versa. That's not much of a chore. However, there are eight major temperature scales available (though some are around now only for their historical value), according to wikipedia. What if you had to write a program that let a user convert a temperature from any of these scales to any of these scales?

Do you have any idea how many if statements you'd have to write? On the previously referenced wikipedia page, there are eight tables (one for each temperature scale) so converting from any of scales to any of scales would, in theory, require 8 times 7 or 56 if statements (it wouldn't be 8 times 8 because you wouldn't convert from a scale to itself). That's an awful lot of coding and there's got to be an easier way.

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