"fred bertsch" writes:

Andy has been following the large discussion of PQS, so I will not enumerate the more minor criticisms included there. Some of the major criticisms that influenced my difficult decision include the following:

* Many of the reviews liked the documentation, but improvements there would help out for a large number of reviewers.

<snip>

* Since the library includes a large number of compile-time type manipulations, it would be great if the library included standard metafunctions to query these types. In addition, following other template metaprogramming conventions established within Boost such as documenting the concepts used would be a great help.

<soapbox> I'm sure Fred didn't mean to leave this impression, but I just want to clarify something here that could be misinterpreted. Documenting concepts is not really "a tempate metaprogramming convention;" it's a convention that was started by Stepanov et. al. when the STL was invented, and is appropriate for all generic libraries. Aleksey used it to document the MPL because it was appropriate there, too. That means almost any library with templates in its public interface should have concept documentation. </soapbox> -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com

"fred bertsch"wrote

The Physical Quantities System review has ended, and, unfortunately, we are going to have to turn it down at this time. However, it is clear from the reviews that there is an enormous amount of interest in the library. I'm really hoping that that Andy Little will continue his work on it and resubmit it for review.

Andy has been following the large discussion of PQS, so I will not enumerate the more minor criticisms included there. Some of the major criticisms that influenced my difficult decision include the following:

* Many of the reviews liked the documentation, but improvements there would help out for a large number of reviewers.

* If the library were more flexible about the type system used, several reviewers would have been happier. However, I would suggest that as long as a plan is in place for improving the flexibility, this should not prevent an initial version of the library from being accepted.

* Since the library includes a large number of compile-time type manipulations, it would be great if the library included standard metafunctions to query these types. In addition, following other template metaprogramming conventions established within Boost such as documenting the concepts used would be a great help.

I'd like to thank Andy Little for the work done so far on PQS and also for responding rapidly to the prolific discussion on the developer's list.

Thanks Fred Bertsch, for all your work in managing the PQS review, especially for helping me keep my nerve in the first week, when it looked like PQS might be the first review to pass without a single comment! I don't quite know what happened but thankfully the review suddenly took off. Thanks to everyone who took part both with reviews and criticisms and comments. Thanks especially to David Walthall and Bill Myers who stepped forward into the crocodile pond that is a boost review and helped break the duck. Thanks to Pavel Vozenilek for breaking the duck and for his very comprehensive review. Thanks to Leland Brown for sharing his own experiences of creating a physical quantities library. Leland , your work has made me see that there is a good use for a quantity with a runtime modifiable dimension, which I hadnt thought about much before. Thanks to Geoffrey Irving, not that he contributed a review but just because his own work is awe inspiring. Thanks to Janek Kozicki for actually getting down and dirty and experimenting with PQS in http://yade.berlios.de/, his epic physical modelling library. I hope to be able to study yade in more detail and even try to port it to a PQS version and Windows. Thanks also for the performance tests, which show I need to take this aspect more seriously. Thanks to John Phillips for his review and attempting to persuade me to widen the scope of PQS into the realm of space-time. I'm thinking about it! Thanks especially to Paul Bristow for his review. Paul, in around 2003 you were the only respondent to my original any interest post re PQS. I often wonder if you regret replying as my reply was quite heated, but an impassioned thread ensued as I well remember that went on for quite a while. Thanks to Matthias Schabel. I don't know that we agreed on any point regarding physical quantities libraries, but PQS still uses your compile time rational FWIW. Good luck with whatever you're doing now. Thanks to Phil Richards for trying to reconcile my and Matthias libraries!. Congratulations on the baby. Thanks to Deane Yang for your comments and suggestions over the years. Thanks to Jan Langer for his input regarding return types of calculations and other stuff. Thanks to Cromwell Enage for providing mpl rational, but me and mpl just don't see eye to eye, but I finally bought the TMP book anyway. Thanks to Eric Ford for his own work on units. Thanks to Zach Laine for his feedback. Thanks to Brandon Forehand. Sorry I lost faith in PQS for a while. Thanks to Ron Garcia for supervising the review process. Thanks to Thorsten Ottosen and Jeff Garland for their encouragement. Thanks to Jesper Schidt for his review and for providing us with more windmills. Thanks to Arkadiy Vertleyb for Boost.Typeof. Thanks to Oleg Abrosimov, Noel Belcourt, Peter Henderson, Jarrad Wateroo, David Greene and Matthias Troyer for putting the time to write reviews. ( BTW If there is anyone I left out Say so Now...) Thanks to everyone else who contributed their comments and thoughts. Especially re vector spaces and such. Thanks to Martin Slater for his suggestions re the Quaternions book. I bought it, whether I will understand it is another matter. :-) Thanks to Herve Bronnimann for his suggestions re PQS. Finally many thanks to David Abrahams and all the other original boosters for simply providing boost. Its an amazing place. Regarding the future of PQS, I have applied to sourceforge and I hope that if the project is accepted it will go under the new title Quan. I hope to continue to work on the library there and hopefully resubmit it to boost at some stage. regards Andy Little