Unit convention

Physical quantities stored in computer do not have a unit with themselves, no matter they are represented as an int, float, or torch.Tensor. The unit of a physical quantity is determined by the context. To this end, DNOIS provides a unit system based on SI to handle physical quantities.

In DNOIS, a physical unit is represented as a string of its symbol. For example, meter is represented as "m" and radian is represented as "rad". Commonly used prefixes are supported, such as "k" for kilo and "m" for milli. For example, kilometer is represented as "km" and millimeter is represented as "mm". All supported units are listed in Units.

DNOIS maintains a global default unit list for all physical quantities. For example, the default unit for length is meter and the default unit for angle is radian. Default units can be accessed via dnois.get_default() and dnois.set_default() or overridden methods of dnois.Unit.default. Units of quantities in DNOIS is the corresponding default unit if not specified otherwise.

>>> import dnois
>>> dnois.get_default('length')
'm'
>>> dnois.Length.default()
m
>>> _ = dnois.Length.default('mm')
>>> dnois.Length.default()
mm
>>> dnois.Length.fmt(1.)
'1mm'

Note that changing the default unit does not affect quantities already created. It dictates only how DNOIS interprets given numerics. For example, assuming one creates a Spherical with roc=1.0 when default unit for length is meter and then modifies the default unit to millimeter, its ROC will not be 0.001 but still 1.0. However, its interpretation will change from 1m to 1mm.

Caution

Do not expect existing quantities to change their unit when default units are changed.

One of reasons why some global default units have to be maintained is that it is hard to maintain a unit for all float and torch.Tensor. With global default units, all quantities with same dimension are assumed to have the same unit. For example, all lengths are assumed to be in meter, or millimeter, etc. One counterexample is wavelengths in dnois.mt, because dispersion equations are calculated in micro meters.

Lastly, units of same dimension can be converted to each other via dnois.convert(). If two units with different dimensions are given, an ValueError will be raised.