On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Stan Schymanski <schym...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hm, since we wanted to get away from implicit functions, the consistent > think to do would be to always require the base when a user wants to use > the log function. I think that this could avoid some confusion. I think that would be too cumbersome. > In every > CAS, I have to check in the documentation what the program means by > log(x). In sage I had to read through the whole doc string and get to > the examples before I was able to deduce that log(x) is the natural log > of x: As you point out below, that can be fixed by making a clear statement about this part of the first sentence. > > > Type: function > Base Class: <type 'function'> > String Form: <function log at 0xf5f4df0> > Namespace: Interactive > > Definition: log(x, base=None) > Docstring: > > Return the logarithm of x to the given base. > > Calls the ``log`` method of the object x when computing > the logarithm, thus allowing use of logarithm on any object > containing a ``log`` method. In other words, log works > on more than just real numbers. > > TODO: Add p-adic log example. > > EXAMPLES:: > > sage: log(e^2) > 2 > sage: log(1024, 2); RDF(log(1024, 2)) > 10 > > I think that the doc string should say that log(x) = log(x,e) right at > the beginning. I very strongly agree. Any chance you could be convinced to submit a patch to do this? William -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
