On Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 6:19:16 PM UTC-4 William Stein wrote:
Hi, I'm the guilty party who added \ to Sage notation in the first place, and I would definitely vote to *remove* it. I wish I had never added it in the first place. Nils has some very good points! I do think it's worth considering whether people outside of the doctests actually use the backslash operator in the Matlab way. This is a well-known shortcut in a lot of the practical computational world, as I've seen when people have tried to type it in other contexts and wonder why it doesn't "just work". For instance, one could look at any linear algebra textbooks that use Sage and see whether they use it. Keeping the mission in mind! That said, this is pretty clearly the only strong reason to implement it, to keep learning new syntax to a minimum for people coming from Matlab/Octave. And maybe those people are not using Sage for this purpose, as it seems to focus more on advanced math(s) capabilities. But one should at least raise the question, and if it's not actively hurting anything, then John's suggestion regarding adding the "usual" behavior outside of the very narrow matroid/ix-related contexts seems best. -- 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/4311cf1f-6022-4339-862e-b1e741420a7en%40googlegroups.com.
