On Mar 13, 2:41 am, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > Felix Lawrence wrote: > > But I've just noticed that mathematica doesn't seem to be responsible > > for the weird orderings here after all - it seems to be sage itself. > > For example: > > sage: 4+I > > I + 4 > > As Nick wrote some time ago, > >> In this example, isn't the sage() function supposed to convert this to > >> a sage data type, which has fixed order printing on all architectures? > > It seems that sage's order printing might be at fault in the > > math_bessel_K example. Could anyone who knows about sage's order > > printing comment on this? > > That will need someone other than me, as I don't know Sage that well. I don't > really understand what the Mathematica interface is trying to achieve either. > I > just tried to use it, and found it failed one of the tests. The mathematica interface is trying to let sage users send commands to mathematica and process the results. Personally, I inherited several thousand lines of mathematica code but strongly dislike programming in mathematica for various reasons. So I set up some nice object- oriented sage/python code that eventually calls this mathematica code and stores/processes the results (very large lists of matrices of complex numbers). I think most users of the interface (though there can't be many since it was broken since 4.3 and we just found out!) seem to want to do symbolic algebra with mathematica that they can't do in sage. > > I don't know how practical this is, but Mathematica has an API for linking to > Mathematica code, through the 'Mathlink' interface. >From what I've seen of the 'Mathlink' interface, it's not what we want here. It's a way to run C code from mathematica, like f2py is a way to run fortran code from python (i'm insulting f2py here because mathlink is waaaay harder to get working). So we'd have to turn it on its head if we wanted to run mathematica commands from the C code, and I'm not sure that's possible.
> However, I think this goes back to the point I made the other day, about there > should be a distinction between "optional" and "experimental". > > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/571efc... I didn't see that thread. AFAIK, "optional" refers to functionality that relies on an external program that isn't installed with sage, so can not be expected to be installed on every computer. Obviously not everyone will have mathematica, maple, octave, etc, so the doctests that rely on these external programs are marked optional so that they don't fail on computers that don't have those programs installed. > > At the moment, with no clear definition of what is an optional package, why > should anyone bother checking? We are told that 'experimental' have in some > cases not built on any machine whatsoever. > > http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.sagemath.org/packages/exp... > > IMHO, without a clear written definition of what can be expected of an > optional > package, there is no reason to bother checking them. I feel we *need* to > define > what optional means, what are the expectations, then we can address these > sorts > of probably better. We should be able to expect that any optional doctests pass on machines with the optional software installed. We can't expect the interfaces to be feature-complete and perfect, but certainly the doctests should pass! Cheers, Felix -- 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
