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From: Janek Kozicki (janek_listy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-06-17 19:23:21


Andy Little said: (by the date of Sun, 11 Jun 2006 10:58:48 +0100)

>
> "David Greene" wrote
> > Andy Little wrote:
> >> I should however try to ensure that the library can potentially be extended to
> >> other unit systems as far as possible, and currently it is weak in that area.
> >
> > I would like that very much. I'm willing to help in whatever way
> > possible. Would it help to gather a list of flexibility requirements?
> > The Boost Wiki would be a good place for that.
>
> Maybe, except is it a lot of work to maintain a Wiki? Anyway wherever its put, a
> list of requirements, unit concepts and even quantity and unit systems that
> should be modelled would certainly be very useful.

Yes, I think that after so much, and so lenghty discussion it may be a
very good point to start a wiki. All people contributing in this
discussion will be interested in writing specifications for expected
libraries.

Libraries, because I currently see three decupled libraries emerging
from all of this:

1. Dimensions (idea from Oleg Abrosimov) to decuple this

perhaps here should be included the ability to use different powers for
dimension scaling: powers of ten or powers of two.

Also Noel Belcourt may have something interesting to say about this,
because he plans to show us uncomplicated solution demonstrating support
for user selectable integer and rational dimensions.

2. Units (with example implemetation of some particular system - eg. SI ;)

3. vector/matrix/quaternion with support for units - but how to call
this library?

I would seriously recommend against calling it geometry. Because this
library will not support circles, ellipses, polylines or any other
geometrical shapes - that would be siply too much for the beginning!
Better start with something simple that has at least a vague possibility
of being implemented at all!

Remember - specification is one thing, we can define even a very complex
library with all geometrical shapes, but who will implement all that? Of
course I want to help with that, but we all have limited time. So better
limit this only to vector/matrix/quaternion.

How to call it then? "Blas" would be confused with Ublas (already a
boost library). Algebra ? LinearAlgebra ?

-- 
Janek Kozicki                                                         |

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