Learning by Doing: dimensioning units or geometric algebra?

[Joel C. Salomon]

Hello all,

I’m a C programmer with some C++ experience (“C with Classes”+STL
anyway; never did implement anything but the most trivial templates) and
I’m looking to get stated with D. I figured a good way to do that would
be to implement a template library, and it may as well be something I’ll
actually use. Here’s what I’m thinking I could make:

• a library for dimensional analysis, like boost::units, and/or
• a set of classes for 2-dimensional Geometric Algebra (scalars,
vectors, and pseudoscalars/imaginary numbers).

(Not to get into a discussion of GA, but its an algebra of scalars,
vectors, &c. with dot products, wedge products (related to the cross
product, but nicer) and a non-commutative “geometric product”. It’s
useful in computer graphics and aerospace control because it has a much
nicer approach to rotations than using matrices.)

Should I start with D1 for now, or jump right in to D2?

Any clues as to which project will get me started with the language faster?

—Joel Salomon