I'm not trying to quell debate and discussion. I just wanted to bring up
the reason we created the package in the first place and encourage its
consideration in future design decisions.


Jason
moorepants.info
+01 530-601-9791

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Justin <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Friday, October 23, 2015 at 7:27:45 PM UTC-4, Nathan Goldbaum wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 6:25 PM, Justin <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> I have a terrible way of wording things.. more of a discussion between
>>> myself and the author where he mentioned that I should ask the community
>>> what they think.
>>>
>>> On Friday, October 23, 2015 at 6:43:51 PM UTC-4, Jason Moore wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Justin,
>>>>
>>>> I don't think there is a debate. We have a very nice vector
>>>> representation in the physics package, but it is based on mutable types and
>>>> isn't very general. We created the sympy.vector package to make a more
>>>> general vector object that was based on immutable types with the idea that
>>>> the physics vector could eventually be deprecated. Our new implementation
>>>> may not be general enough for the mathematicians' taste and we are willing
>>>> to improve it so that it is, but we would still want it to eventually allow
>>>> us to deprecate sympy.physics.vector. The addition of vectors from
>>>> different coordinate systems is essential to this plan. So whatever you
>>>> want to do to improve the package will have my support but I hope that you
>>>> will keep this intended use case in mind when you think about bigger design
>>>> changes.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I come from a physics background and can't see when or why this would be
>>> useful so my opinion is certainly biased.  As to the generality of the
>>> package there are no constrains on doing this and, bias and all, this tells
>>> me there ought to be some.  I am new to contributing so I will keep my head
>>> down and add functionality as you mentioned.  I am not trying to step on
>>> toes here...
>>>
>>
>> A vector (e.g. the mathematical object, not necessarily its
>> representation) should be independent of the coordinate system, no?  So
>> long as there are well-defined translations between the coordinate systems,
>> it should certainly be possible to do arithmetic operations on two vectors
>> whose representations are written down in different coordinate systems.
>>
>
> The way I see it is that well are defining two different (or the same)
> coordinate systems with different (or the same) basis and allowing
> arithmetic operations between these two different (or the same) coordinate
> system.  The thing is we don't know until we make some definitions of the
> coordinate system whether the vector is well defined. For example:
>
> Say C1 is defined and the origin is set at (0,0,0).  C2 is defined where
> it's y-axis aligns along C1's x-axis and origin is set at (0,0,0).  Any
> scaling could be set on C2 wrt C1. Is the operation
> C1.x * C1.i + C2.y * C2.j a well-defined vector?
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "sympy" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to [email protected].
> To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/e1c47552-167f-4cb1-aa33-19bb896af677%40googlegroups.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/e1c47552-167f-4cb1-aa33-19bb896af677%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
> .
>
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"sympy" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy.
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAP7f1AgFKCvB3BnyZejf-kCvGmoPE3%3DYqRMUF78C3mNwuMKffw%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to