Daniel Russel wrote: > My thought had been to wait until IMP required a new enough boost and > switch to that, but it is taking a while. Are people interested? The > code is pretty stable, but could use a bit of documentation and > cleanup if others are to use it.
I don't really see the application of general units in most cases, and would prefer we stick with conventions on what units to use (e.g angstroms for distances). My main concerns are numerical inaccuracies creeping in with an inappropriate choice of units (e.g. passing meters into something that stores internally as angstroms - it would be better if the user knew that was the representation was) and how any output values are displayed - are you suggesting a unit conversion on output as well as input? That said, it's nice to have explicit units to reduce confusion (e.g. MMTK has similar IIRC). I'm not so keen on two functions for everything though, since that's twice as much code to test. It seems like we should able to handle this in Python with suitable proxy classes and typemaps anyway.
As for Boost, 1.36 is really new and I'd prefer not to use a version that hasn't made its way into the mainstream stable distributions like CentOS yet. We don't want to force everybody to use Fedora.
Ben