I'm +1 on this idea in general, and if you can manage the suggestion that Nathan made about auto-generating the file with the docs build than that is great too.  One clarification though: Are you planning to leave the Universal Fields (eg many of the derived fields) the way they are, or change them too?  I think you could switch them to the same format that you propose, but it might be worthwhile to have a link to the source code defining those fields if you do.  I like that we give people the source on the derived fields here, and I'd hate to give that up.

Cameron

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, November 25, 2014, Michael Zingale <michael.zingale@stonybrook.edu> wrote:

I've been looking over the field list:

http://yt-project.org/docs/dev/reference/field_list.html#field-list

At the bottom of that page, we list the fields specific to each frontend/code.  I'd like to make the presentation for each frontend a table, with columns for the name, units, what its aliases to, and whether it is a particle -- these are what we currently list, and perhaps show the display name.  Showing it as a table for each frontend would be more compact than the list, and I think it would be clearer for people to read.  Before I hack the script that writes that page, I wanted to see if there are any objections.

+1

While you're at it, it would be great if that page was autogenerated as part of the docs build. To get that to work, you will need to create a sphinx extension that calls the script and writes the field list page. Right now the script is not called as part of the docs build, so any changes made to the script need to be accompanied by a manual change to the field list page.

 

Also, a minor point, there is a _dynamical_time() field which I assume is the free-fall timescale assuming uniform density throughout the collapse.  I've always seen a '32' not '16' in the denominator (see, e.g. Carroll & Ostlie, Eq. 12.26 or Kippenhahn & Weigert Eq. 27.10)

I agree that 32 is more commonly used. It looks like it's been 16 for quite a long time, the reasons why it's set that way might be lost to the mists of time. I'd be +1 for changing it to be more in line with standard nomenclature.

 

--

Michael Zingale

Associate Professor

Dept. of Physics & Astronomy • Stony Brook University • Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800

phone:  631-632-8225

e-mail: Michael.Zingale@stonybrook.edu

web: http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/mzingale

 

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--

Cameron Hummels

Postdoctoral Researcher

Steward Observatory

University of Arizona

http://chummels.org

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