[Yt-dev] simple quantities

[Matthew Turk]

Hi Britton and Stephen,

I believe John Wise had written some star particle convenience
routines.  Also, the Enzo hierarchy object has the property num_stars,
which accumulates the values of NumberOfStarParticles (which I think
we should make an array, like particle_count.)  For instance, in
RD0005, num_stars is set to 351.

More generally, I do agree that having convenience functions is a
useful thing.  I've made a few short forays, but none have ever really
been successful.  It's hard to get a simple API that covers a lot of
ground, while avoiding being confusing to the user or to other
developers.

(The first empirical law of yt seems to be: function arguments will
seek to expand until they fill an entire file ...)

But, I agree: there is a *huge* amount of functionality that is, just
now, very difficult to provide access to without boilerplate code.  So
what I think might be most helpful and productive is if we brainstorm
a set of functionality that would be good to provide access to, and
maybe a proposed way of providing that functionality.

So ... what would this set of convenience functions look like?

-Matt

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Britton Smith <brittonsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Stephen,
>
> I agree that this information, specifically the current number of star
> particles, should be easy to get at.  Maybe the solution should be on the
> enzo side instead of the yt side, as in maybe enzo should be carrying that
> around as a variable that can easily be made an attribute to the pf or put
> in the pf.parameters dict.  I'm just wondering if that may just be easier.
> Just a thought.
>
> Britton
>
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 7:28 PM, Stephen Skory <stephenskory at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> after my conversation on -users with Matt, and the recent investigations
>> of inline yt, a thought occurs to me. The whole point of the conversation
>> was that I would like to do some inline analysis of a simulation with
>> star(s). As a zero-order test, the analysis shouldn't run if there are no
>> stars, so I wanted to find out how many stars there are. But as the
>> conversation revealed, it isn't simple/blindingly obvious to do that kind of
>> calculation in a way that works in serial, parallel, and inline, e.g. with
>> derived quantities.
>>
>> How do we feel about my writing a set of convenience functions that make
>> these simple calculations easy? This shouldn't be comprehensive, just things
>> that might come up often. Thoughts?
>>
>>  Stephen Skory
>> stephenskory at yahoo.com
>> http://stephenskory.com/
>> 510.621.3687 (google voice)
>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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