Hack request: rational numbers

[Rainer Deyke]

"Moshe Zadka" <moshez at zadka.site.co.il> wrote in message
news:mailman.980702855.389.python-list at python.org...
> On Sun, 28 Jan 2001 16:24:10 GMT, chaoweilun at my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > Sorry,BTW,could anyone tell me,why the letter "j" is used
> > to represent complex numbers, but not "i"?
>
> Guido believes there should be one way to do everything, so in some
> ancient time he polled the python-list, and since there were more
engineers
> then mathematicians, "j" won.
>
> "j" is very common to denote the square root of -1 in engineering since
> "i" denotes current.

Why not add native quaternion support to Python?  Quaternions are complex
numbers where the imaginary part is a vector in three dimensions, defined in
terms of unit vectors i, j, and k.  The following properties hold true:

i*i = -1
i*j = k
i*k = -j
j*i = -k
j*j = -1
j*k = i
k*i = j
k*j = -i
k*k = -1


--
Rainer Deyke (root at rainerdeyke.com)
Shareware computer games           -           http://rainerdeyke.com
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