I mentioned recently that I’m working on
features for siunitx v3.1. One area that I’ve
now been able to commit is improvements to handling complex values.
In v2, you could give complex values in the normal argument to \num or \SI.
I removed that for v3, and of course that was not entirely popular. Instead, I
introduced dedicated commands, \complexnum and \complexqty. Part of the
reason for that was that it makes the implementation of \num and \qty/\SI
easier. But the other was that I wanted to address polar form, and that really
didn’t look viable if it was mixed in with the normal numerical argument type.
I’ve now committed a
change
that introduces support for polar form in siunitx. So what happens now is if
you give a value such as \num{10:30}, it’s treated as a magnitude and an
angle. The latter has a setting to determine if it’s regarded as being in
degrees or radians. The package can then typeset the result in a similar form,
using the \angle symbol between the two parts. You can also set up to convert
between the classical (Cartesian) and polar forms of the value. So hopefully
this shows why I wanted to separate out complex numbers: they need special
handling, and now they get it.