I really need to go to sleep so I won't do a top-ten, but here's a top 2: 1) Powerful substitutions and rules. Sage does not have anything comparable. The .subs() function is buggy even in its limited domain. There have been previous posts on sage-devel that give good examples of this.
2) Implicit variable declaration - ? I'm not sure what to call this. Basically, mathematica assumes everything is in the equivalent of its symbolic ring until told otherwise. Because of problems with Sage's symbolics, I often have to explicitly declare a ring (e.g. R.<x,y,z> = PolynomialRing(QQ,3)), and then later when I want to do something else declare another ring. I often get headaches when adding or removing variables, changing term orders, or trying to do simplifications in which intermediate quantities don't fit the current setup (e.g. a fraction field). I am hoping that some of the coercion changes will help with some of this. Part of my problem with #2 probably doesn't make as much sense to you because Mathematica has a bias towards working in QQ, and that is what I usually care about. I am sure that if you like working over more exotic fields Sage starts to have advantages. Hope that helps, I am too tired to explain in more detail right now. Cheers, M. Hampton On Aug 20, 11:38 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 9:37 PM, mhampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I used to really enjoy writing programs in mathematica, but maybe I'm > > a strange person. I only stopped in order to force myself to get > > fluent with Sage. I think it just depends on your background, what > > you are used to, and what you want to do. For symbolic calculations > > and programming I still miss mathematica quite often. > > Could you remind me (yet again) of the top ten things you miss about > mathematica for symbolic calculations? > > -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
