Hartmut, I would like to generate well-formed units and create expressions of
In the middle of the directX thread, Daniel Duffy asked a question that seems more suited to its own thread. I'm starting that thread and giving others a chance to join into the discussion by giving you the content of the few messages that have passed by so far. John From Daniel --------------------------------------------------- Hello, This is my first mail, so I hope I have sent it to the right address :) I am using the Units library for Dimensional Analysis. So far it is very useful. Up till now I am using it in a hard-coded/compile time way as in a test.cpp. My inteterst is in using Units as part of a larger run-time system so I need some way of making my code more flexible. Lambda library is an option here but I would also like to create units and quanties from string input as well as being able to parse these strings to units and then store the units in a database. Can I use Spirit (and Serialization) for these features? Maybe the functionality already exist, and I have not found it. best regrads Daniel J. Duffy From Hartmut --------------------------------------------------- Sure Spirit is your friend for all parsing and output generation needs. What did you have in mind? Regards Hartmut From Daniel ---------------------------------------------------- Hartmut, I would like to generate well-formed units and create expressions of the followiong kinds: Examples of unit expressions: 1. 2m + 15m*32s/16s = 32m. 2. 3m*7s + 2m*10s/5m = 21m + 4s -> ERROR. Can't add meters to seconds. The second group looks more tricky. Examples of simplification: 1. (x-2)2 + 4x2 - 2^x + 1 = 5x2 - 8x + 10 2. x2 + 7x + 10 = (x + 2)(x + 5) 3. (a + b)(a - b) = a2 - b2 4. sin(x)2 + cos(x)2 = 1 5. 2sin(x)cos(x) = sin(2x) One tricky part is for example #5 where the code needs to 'know' trigonometry. best regards Daniel From John ---------------------------------------------------------- Daniel J. Duffy wrote: the followiong kinds:
Examples of unit expressions: 1. 2m + 15m*32s/16s = 32m. 2.
3m*7s + 2m*10s/5m = 21m + 4s -> ERROR. Can't add meters to seconds. So, you want this to happen at run time, or at compile time? At compile time, I think you are already set with the Units library. At run time, there are examples with the library that would help. If parsing the input is your concern, then Spirit is a good choice. (Spirit 2 is even better, by the way.) Using the two together, you could write a program where a user enters your example lines and gets correct responses.
The second group looks more tricky.
Examples of simplification: 1. (x-2)2 + 4x2 - 2^x + 1 = 5x2 -
One tricky part is for example #5 where the code needs to 'know'
8x + 10 2. x2 + 7x + 10 = (x + 2)(x + 5) 3. (a + b)(a - b) = a2 - b2 4. sin(x)2 + cos(x)2 = 1 5. 2sin(x)cos(x) = sin(2x) trigonometry. As far as I can tell here, you are looking for a program that does symbolic algebra. If that is true, then I don't think boost has a complete solution for you. Writing the parser for the input with Spirit wouldn't be that bad, but writing the processing engine that matches patterns and does simplifications is not covered by any current Boost libraries. I don't recall seeing anyone poll for interest on this, so I don't think there is even a partial library in the sandbox. Would you want this at run time, compile time, both? I haven't tried to write it, but I think a pure compile time implementation would be prohibitively slow. For a pure run time solution, you might consider linking to already existing solutions, such as Maple or Mathematica.
best regards
Daniel
John