[SciPy-dev] Period table?

[val]

Sounds very reasonable to me, Adam. My understanding is that any metadata
can be added to an element, right? And the search can also be done with 
the (new) data as a search string (if one is interested in interpretation of 
experimental data).  I'd be happy to help with "chemistry".
cheers, val
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Adam Curtis 
  To: scipy-dev at scipy.org 
  Sent: Sunday, December 17, 2006 9:15 PM
  Subject: Re: [SciPy-dev] Period table?


  Well I've sketched up some starting source code for it, to get a feel of how to organize everything.

  Basically there will be a "periodic" class and an "element" class. 

  Element objects will consist of various data like atomic number, atomic mass, name, symbol,  melting point, freezing point, critical point, density, etc... as well as various methods to calculate things like the state of the element at a given temperature. 

  The periodic class will act as the organized framework for the whole thing. It will contain several dictionaries mapping unique qualities of each element to their element objects, so that you can quickly do element lookups. I think using dictionaries instead of one big sequence works better in this case, because it allows for faster lookups to the fairly non-dynamic and unchanging collection of data. 

  On the user end, the periodic table would work much like a combination between an array and a dictionary. You can use symbol, name, or atomic number as dictionary keys to look up the desired element, and the whole table of elements can be iterated over like a list. Methods will be used to return lists of elements by group, period, series, number of valence electrons, state at a given room temperature, density, etc... 

  Default temperature measurements will be in Celsius, although there will be unit conversions supported (I'm assuming scipy has a unit conversion package I could borrow from)

  I'm not much of a chemistry buff, so I'll need some help filling in the actual information, but I can work on the organizational structure in the meantime. 





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