Re: [boost] [ANN] Boost.Time_series: feedback requested

From: Austin Bingham (abingham_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-12-14 17:55:48

Like many other posters, I'm excited to see this work being
done. Not to be shown up by Zach, I also have a few questions
about the library.

First, it's not entirely clear to me whether arithmetic
operations between series with different non-integer discretizations
is allowed. From the documentation:

  Arithmetic operations between series is only defined when the 
  series have the same discretization. When the discretization 
  is a plain integer, the discretizations are checked for 
  compatibility at runtime.

If I'm reading this correctly, arithmetic between unequal 
non-integer series is undefined but not checked at runtime. If
so, why isn't it checked? 

Along those lines, I can envision a situation where I *would*
want to do the kind of arithmetic described above. In some
applications, the notions of time and range are effectively
interchangeable. If I have two "time series", one discretized
on range and one on time but both representing the same
physical space, I might reasonably expect to be able to 
add them together. I realize I'm stretching a bit here,
but I want to get your sense of how things like this might
be dealt with in this library.

Does the clip() function necessarily copy the source data? It's
often nice to be able to generate a sliced view of some source
data without actually copying it. I assume clip()
does copy, so I was wondering if there is a facility for
prodcing non-copying views of a time series.

Again, I really like the work you've done so far, and I'd love
to have a robust, high-feature time-series library. I'll keep
looking things over and let you know if I've got any more
questions.

--
Austin Bingham
Signal & Information Sciences Laboratory
Applied Research Laboratories, University of Texas at Austin
10000 Burnet Rd., Austin, TX 78758
email:  abingham_at_[hidden]
cell:   [phone]
office: [phone]