Nathan Dunfield wrote: > -1: I don't really care what RealField.__repr__ returns, but cast a > token no vote to object to the logical next move of breaking backwards > compatibility by changing the meaning of RealField and/or RR. I see > the need for a "genuine real field", but it seems a lot simpler just > to call it something other than "RealField" and so not break a lot of > existing users' Sage code.
I agree. More precisely, I am in favor of changing the string representation so that it contains the word "floating-point". I don't care about the exact wording. However, I think that the drawbacks of changing the meaning of RealField or RR greatly outweigh the benefits (at least now, probably also in the long term, but I might change my mind if a really useful AbstractRealField is ever implemented). To the backward compatibility reasons others have mentioned, I would add that for many people, "real numbers" in a "computational" context *does* mean floating-point numbers! -- Marc -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/rmpq0o%24ec8%241%40ciao.gmane.io.
