Zero and zerounit, analogous to one and oneunit?

Internals & Design
1

Following this reasoning, shouldn’t we also have zerounit for consistency? zero can be defined as the additive identity.

I find it very strange that we need to write code with a mix of oneunit and zero instead of oneunit and zerounit.

2

zero is defined as the additive identity in Julia. This is a unitful quantity, hence no need for zerounit.

Originally, Julia had just one (multiplicative identity) and zero (additive identity). But then people started mis-using one for unitful quantities to get the unit (julia#16116), so we introduced oneunit to disambiguate. There is no similar need for zerounit.

See also Revise `zero` and define `zerounit`? · Issue #24853 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub and Change `one` to `onemult` · Issue #36103 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub for related naming discussions.

4 Likes
3

Very interesting discussions. Thanks for the links.