I am currently tasked to write a software to help engineers design standard compliant designs. If there is a bad design, software will report an error or warning.

Maybe it's just me, but anyone who has done this should be familiar with the massive amounts of ANSI standards tables like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_Pipe_Size

Computers are, as its name suggest, computing machines, not lookup machines. I feel that feeding formulas into computers and churning out standard compliant designs is much more efficient than doing memory intensive data lookups that are prone to human input errors and susceptible to "data updates".

I actually think that there are formulas to calculate all those numbers, but nobody so far could give me that information. Anyone been through this before? What is THE best approach to this? Thanks for sharing.