[Numpy-discussion] Proxy array class and units

[Anne Archibald]

On 13/02/2008, Dan Goodman
<dg.gmane.comp.python.numeric.general at thesamovar.net> wrote:

> Background: I'm writing a package to run simulations which make extensive use of
> linear algebra, for which I'm using numpy. However - it is important to my
> package that quantities can have dimesions, so I've written a class Quantity
> subclassed from float which includes the physical dimensions and raises
> exceptions etc. if you try to add volts to kilograms or whatever. This seems to
> work fine, but I also wanted arrays containing physical dimensions. I wrote a
> class qarray subclassed from numpy.ndarray which mostly just copies the
> functionality of an array with dtype=object. Here is the issue. The code for my
> package internally doesn't use these qarray objects, it uses numpy arrays
> because it would obviously be terribly slow to be repeatedly checking if the
> dimensions were consistent all the time. However, I want to present a (somewhat)
> consistent strict unit-checking front to the user of this package. As one part
> of this, I would like a class that appears to act exactly like a qarray (which
> itself is supposed to act very much like a numpy array) but maintains a
> connection with its numpy array counterpart in my package.

I'm not sure I understand all the different layers you're talking
about here. I think that I would attack your problem in the following
way:

Use ScientificPython's PhysicalQuantity (alone and in object arrays)
or "unum"s to represent quantities with units:
http://books.google.com/books?id=3nR75KSvsq4C&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=numpy+physicalquantity&source=web&ots=_cmXEC0qpx&sig=JBEz9BlegnIQJor-1BwnAdRTKLE

Object arrays are fairly horrible, but having one unit per array
shouldn't be very inefficient. It could cause some headaches, since
it's sometimes useful to have an array with mixed units (differential
equation solvers often require this when you convert a higher-order
problem to first-order, for example), but it should be quite efficient
computationally.

So I would pull together an array that held a collection of quantities
all in the same units. Type checking then becomes a once-per-array
operation, which is relatively cheap. The way I'd implement this is
(by preference) by grabbing a version off the net, or (if that fails)
as a subclass of ndarray. If I want to do some heavy-duty array
mangling without type checking getting in my way, I'll just convert to
an ndarray (either normalizing the units or saving them), do the heavy
lifting, and reapply the units afterwards.

I don't really see why you're talking about proxy classes... Perhaps
your problem is actually two problems: implementing unit arrays, and
doing something I haven't understood. Is there any reason not to
separate the two, and use one of the existing solutions for unit
arrays?

Anne