Hi On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 09:20:40PM -0800, cool-RR wrote: > I understood that the goal is to take from the huge corpus of > available mathematical algorithms and packages, and combine them in > one seamless package (Which is a huge amount of work, of course.) Is > that true?
Yes, but adding a huge amount of native sage code, and as a process improving non-native code or replacing with native code where necessary. > I understand that you have to run Sage as a sort of server. I remember > I had to use VMWare. And then you access it from the browser, and it's > an AJAX thing that makes it behave like a notebook. > Why? Why not something like Mathematica, where you just open a normal > program and have a place where you can just type text? The sage server has a shell (terminal, command-line) interface. It is based on the excellent ipython shell which has additional features over python (tab completion, better help, and loads more). The notebook is a friendly graphical interface. A web browser/ajax interface *IS* a "normal program" too. It has additional advantages for access over the internet!! Both provide a seamless interface to all the constituen "non-native" parts instead of opening each part's idea of a "normal program". The best ideas of those other programs are used in the notebook. The web interface is also way more platform independent than any normal program. As SAGE is unix based, the VMware is necessary to run on a windows platform. Consider a user friendly Linux distribution like Ubuntu or whatever is common where you work/study, as you can then run SAGE natively. > Also, that AJAX thing, while pretty impressive relatively to something > that's being done in the browser, doesn't display expressions nicely, > in "mathematical style", but instead shows them in "programmer style". > Don't you think it's a big disadvantage? You can check a "display" option in the top of the notebook to display all equations as pretty. Both pretty and programming styles (text, usable by other programs, which is important) are available. For a sinlge expression use show(x) instead of x to see the pretty display. Perhaps the bigger shortcomings are some IDE like functionality for autocompletion, some of which is already in there, syntax highlighting and the like. Due to the intensive processing slowing down the notebook interface some have been removed and are being worked on. regards, Jan -- .~. /V\ Jan Groenewald /( )\ www.aims.ac.za ^^-^^ -- 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 URL: http://www.sagemath.org
