Quaternions in Python

[Paul Rubin]

Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> writes:
> > I think there's a simple way to represent quaternions as 3x3 matrices.
> > So you could probably just store them that way and use NumPy for the
> > arithmetic.
> 
> ... which rather defeats the purpose for using quaternions in the first
> place.

Nah.  I mean, if efficiency was a big issue, you wouldn't be using an
interpreted language in the first place.  What's left, if you have a
good matrix package, is something like if your language had complex
numbers but didn't have reals.  You can still represent the reals as
complexes.  For that matter, lots of languages have had reals but no
integers.  It hasn't been that bad a problem.