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Quaternions in Python

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Sat Oct 6 03:58:18 EDT 2001 
Paul Rubin wrote:

> Nah.  I mean, if efficiency was a big issue, you wouldn't be using an
> interpreted language in the first place.  What's left, if you have a
> good matrix package, is something like if your language had complex
> numbers but didn't have reals.  You can still represent the reals as
> complexes.  For that matter, lots of languages have had reals but no
> integers.  It hasn't been that bad a problem.

You're missing the point.  Quaternions can behave qualitatively
differently from their corresponding matrices.  You use quaternions in
which matrices have stability problems.  Do a Web search with
"quaternions matrices gimbal lock" and you'll see what I mean.

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