Numerical Calculations in Clifford Algebra

3Output

A variety of methods are provided to display formatted character strings representing the numeric values of the Clifford numbers contained in the data type ‘number’. Most of the methods write the values to the standard output stream ‘stdout’, allowing some control over what information is printed and how the numerical values are formatted. When these methods produce unsatisfactory results, the best approach is to recover the values of coefficients and units in numeric form and format those according to the need of the particular application.

All of the examples in this chapter use a single three‐dimensional number, generated by the code shown in Example 3.1. That way the outputs of all of the examples can be sensibly compared to one another.

Example 3.1

 1: number make_data()
 2: {
 3:   cliff_comp u_comp;
 4:   number u;
 5: 
 6:   u=fresh_number();  
 7:   u=merge_comp(u,pack_comp(&u_comp,1.11,2.22,spack_unit("e{}")),addition_to,identity);
 8:   u=merge_comp(u,pack_comp(&u_comp,3.33,4.44,spack_unit("e{0}")),addition_to,identity);
 9:   u=merge_comp(u,pack_comp(&u_comp,5.55,6.66,spack_unit("e{1}")),addition_to,identity);
10:   u=merge_comp(u,pack_comp(&u_comp,7.77,8.88,spack_unit("e{0,1}")),addition_to,identity);
11:   u=merge_comp(u,pack_comp(&u_comp,9.99,10.0,spack_unit("e{2}")),addition_to,identity);
12:   u=merge_comp(u,pack_comp(&u_comp,11.1,12.2,spack_unit("e{0,2}")),addition_to,identity);
13: u=merge_comp(u,pack_comp(&u_comp,13.3,14.4,spack_unit("e{1,2}")),addition_to,identity); ...