> I do not understand this claim. As Ralf pointed out, there are good > (i.e. "mathematical") reasons why it makes sense to multiply elements > of GF(5) directly by integers. This has nothing to do with coercions > or any other kind of type conversion per se. It makes sense to have > this property of GF implemented locally. It would be inconvenient to > have a symbol other than * to denote this operation. Because Python is > dynamically typed, there is no alternative but to test some condition > to determine what operation to perform. Using the coercion system to > implement this kind of polymorphism moves some properties of GF into > the coercion system instead of keeping it local.
Yes ! The clear notion is that GF(5) is a ZZ module. And I want to stress that this has nothing to do with coercion. It is important to realize that we use the same symbol "*" for internal product in group/ring/algebras and action/scalar multiplication. When you want to multiply a 1000x1000 matrix by a scalar, you don't build a 1000x1000 scalar matrix and apply the multiplication algorithm for matrices... Just my two cents... Cheers, Florent --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
