On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Maurizio<maurizio.gran...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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.
Well it can't hurt to write to him and ask what he thinks... There is also the fact that Sage has rings, elements, parents, a coercion model, etc. which might throw a monkey wrench into everything (I don't know). -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
