2009/7/1 William Stein <wst...@gmail.com>: > Perhaps I'm missing the point, but I'm taking this as a message to > focus in Sage more on the algebraic/symbolic side of mathematics > (e.g., Magma, Maple, Mathematica) rather than the numerical side, at > least for the time being. I don't have a problem with that > personally, since that is what I do best, and where most of my > personal interests are.
I'm joining this conversation late, so I am glad to see the conclusions reached so far (not to give up on numerics!). If I may highlight a distinction (maybe obvious to some) between SAGE and NumPy-based experiments: Sage provides a "language" for eloquently expressing algebraic/symbolical problems. On the other hand, NumPy is mainly a library (that provides a data structure with accompanying operations). This means that users of that library expect to run their code unmodified on any Python platform where it is available (Sage included). Whether this expectation is reasonable or not is up for debate, but I certainly found it surprising that I had to modify my code in order to compute things in Sage. On a more practical level, it frightens me that Maxima spawns so easily without my even knowing, simply by refering to a certain variable or by using the wrong "exp". That's the kind of thing that kills numerics performance! I'm not convinced that commercial packages have crossed this barrier successfully either. I've seen talks where people switch between Maple and MATLAB to do different tasks, which tells me that this is a more general problem that is far from solved. Stéfan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
