From: "Robert Ramey" <ramey@rrsd.com>
Andy Little wrote:
I would hope that a general purpose physical quantities lib would deal with units, even if you dont use anything but the base units. The Mars lander crash and all that. IOW you need to be explicit about what units you are using.
In my view, a dimension library has to exist independently of any units library. It is a separate and smaller concept. I should stand on its own.
At the risk of sounding stupid: What's a dimension library? I.e. how might it look like, and be used (preferably a code example)? I've searched the Boost list for "dimension library"/"dimensions library", but your posting is the only one coming up. For example, if it only takes care of dimensional analysis (i.e. dimension calculations), how many dimensions should it have, if it's independent of units? If the answer is "user-configurable through typelists/vectors", have anyone done any compile-time timing of dimension calulation-heavy code using this approach, compared to a fixed set of dimensions? Won't this bring us right back to the "how many dimensions"-discussion of a unit/quantity library? Regards, Terje