I am wondering whether somebody contacted the author. Let me cite him (everything is better explained in the wiki):
- I have another idea for further development, which is more technical. It is to remove the unit dictionary stored as Unum's class attributes (which is the cornerstone of the current design !). Currently, the unit symbol strings are used as keys for this dictionary; numerous dictionary lookups may occur at unit normalization or unification. The idea now is that each unum contains direct references to other unums representing its inner units. More precisely, basic units (as meter, second, etc) are, by definition, terminal unums (without references); derived units (as Newton, Joule, etc) have a dictionary with, as keys, unums representing basic/derived units, and, as values, their exponents; finally, any quantity may be derived with the same idea. The big picture at the end is that all quantities, units and conversion rules boils down to a single connected graph where each node is a unum. This redesign should save a lot in time and memory consumption. It requires however to rewrite almost all Unum's methods. I wrote a small prototype to validate the concept, with promising results. This is coming from the last entry of Unum Diary ( http://home.scarlet.be/be052320/Unum_diary.html ). Do you think could be possible for us to get the prototype from him, and to adapt it to work with SAGE, in order to take advantage of his experience in designing a Units of Measurement package, and at the same time to get the chance to make it work well with SAGE in the early phase of its development? The result could be the same to make Quantities work with SAGE, but I am doubtful if it would take less time to make Quantities work well in SAGE, rather than adopt this Unum (let's say 5.0 alpha) and possibly invite the original author to cooperate with us, if he's willing to and has some spare time. Regards Maurizio On Jun 15, 12:10 am, Maurizio <maurizio.gran...@gmail.com> wrote: > I added some comments to the wiki about Quantities as well. > > From the point of view of the code, I can give my impression, but I'm > not experienced in programming. > Unum looks simple and understandable. > Quantities looks more complex, and even finding the right way to look > at is difficult for me. Anyway, this could also mean that the package > is refined and designed from an experienced programmer, so this could > be a pro. Anyway, that would certainly prevent people like me to work > on it :) > > Regards > > Maurizio > > On 14 Giu, 23:38, Maurizio <maurizio.gran...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > "as" is going to be a keyword in Python 2.6 so this will actually have > > > to be changed. It makes sense to do it before it's in Sage since it > > > will break code. > > > Yes, indeed that's even coming out when executing its own test suite: > > Python is warning that as is a keyword in 2.6. > > > > > Note that the license is GPLv2, not GPLv2+, > > > >http://home.scarlet.be/be052320/license.txt > > > > Maybe someone should contact the package author about that > > > > before a definite move is made? > > > > All of the license statements on the source code itself are GPLv2+. > > > > There are also a few changes that should to be done such as something like > > > > try: > > > from sage.all import Integer > > > ONE = Integer(1) > > > except ImportError: > > > ONE = 1.0 > > > > so that it plays nicer with exact arithmetic. > > > > --Mike > > > William, as I stated in the wiki, I'm gaining interest toward Unum. I > > was going to include some examples of Quantites in SAGE as well (for > > "par condicio", as they say in Italy). > > > I don't know what about contacting the author or modifying the code, > > but please consider also the effort needed to make it work with the > > non-arithmetic functions: > > 1. trigonometric > > 2. integration, derivation > > 3. possibly compatibility with symbolics? > > > I would consider point (1) the minimum necessary to avoid making Unum > > (or any other units package) inclusion meaningless. > > > Thanks for the interest, anyway > > > Regards > > > Maurizio --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
