[boost] Re: Geometric Algebra Library

From: Ken Hagan (K.Hagan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-06-10 04:49:11

Jaap Suter wrote:
>
> [crossposted to oo-numerics and boost-developers]
>
> About 20 months back, I asked if there was any interest in a
> geometric or Clifford algebra library written in C++. Despite some
> positive replies, I got the impression that there were not a lot
> of people in the Boost community who saw any practical uses for
> such library.

For a full geometric algebra, I suspect the target market is going
to be limited to a few thousand people worldwide, most of whom have
never heard of boost and are unwilling to learn C++.

I wrote some GA classes for the 3D case about a decade ago, and I'm
still using them, but they are a very minor part of my work and I've
no reason to "upgrade" to a boost version, no matter how yummy it looks.
I'd like to be more positive, but I have to be honest.

However, you may be asking the wrong question. There are reasonable
arguments for using only one library for all your geometric algebra
and the demand for complex numbers is demonstrably large enough to
justify including it in the language standard. The market for 3D
geometry in video games is also fairly well established.

Given that GA is a superset of these, could your library replace
these two? It would need to be syntactically compatible, since we
can't break existing clients of std::complex, but since all such
libraries try to follow standard mathematical notation this might
not be too difficult.

The same probably applies to M. Holin's quaternions and octonions,
already in boost, but I'm not familiar with those.