From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2007-12-25T23:48:32+09:00
Subject: STICK In Your Stocking

Holiday Greetings,

We are happy to announce the first official release of Stick, the
Scientific Code Kit for Ruby.

  http://stick.rubyforge.org

Stick is a spin-off of Facets' units.rb --the most excellent SI type
system library by Peter Vanbroekhoven. This library, and its new
cousin currency.rb, provide a very powerful system for working with SI
typed and currency values in a Ruby-esque way. For example:

  10.m / 10.s             #=> 1 m/s
  1.bit/s + 8.bytes/s     #=> 65.0 bit/s
  1.mile.to(feet)         #=> 5280.0 feet
  1.acre.to(yd**2)        #=> 4840.0 yd**2

Alson with the units system we've added a new matrix library which
includes the Cosmin Bonchis extensions from his Google's Summer of
Code 2007 project. Typed matrix operations are also possible:

  Matrix[[1,2,3]] * 1.kg
  => [[1 kg, 2 kg, 3kg ]]

Fun! Fun! :)

In addition to the units and matrix libraries, STICK has a large
collection of natural constants, based on the original compilation by
Daniel Carrera and Brian Gough (hats off to you guys!).

The goal of the STICK project is to provide a valuable resource for
science and math oriented developers who like to use Ruby. If you have
any libraries that you feel would make a good fit, please let us know.
And if you find this project useful please consider donating a little
time to further polish it up.

This is the first public release for this project --despite the
version number ;) So please let us know if you run into any issues.
Also, note that the currency conversions are not currently working --
the back-end service we were using is no longer operational. We'll fix
this as time permits.

Thanks and enjoy,

                   Trans & Peter