On Feb 23, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Carl Witty wrote:
> Currently, symbolic expressions have 3 identical "derivative" > methods: .derivative(), .diff(), and .differentiate() (that is, they > are aliases of each other). These have a powerful argument list; > foo.diff(x, 3, y, z, 2) differentiates three times with respect to x, > then once with respect to y, then twice with respect to z. (And if > foo contains only one variable, then foo.diff() differentiates with > respect to that variable.) > > Polynomials (both univariate and multivariate) have a .diff() method, > which takes a required variable argument; univariate polynomials also > have a .derivative() method, which does not take an argument. > > There are also global functions diff(), differentiate(), and > derivative(), which are basically wrappers for the .derivative() > method: diff(foo, ...) is equivalient to foo.derivative(...). > > 1) Do we really need three names for this concept? Could we get rid > of one or two? If so, can we just remove it, or do we need some sort > of deprecation procedure? > > 2) I plan to make the polynomial methods match the symbolic expression > methods. (This should be backward-compatible.) Any objections? Carl, I'm glad you've brought this up now, I was planning to take this on myself in the next few days. I strongly agree everything should be harmonised. Here are several related tickets: http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/756 http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/753 http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/1578 david --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
