On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Alex Ghitza <aghi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 4 Aug 2010 13:21:11 -0700 (PDT), cousteau > <cousteaulecommand...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I agree with Simon in that developers may be reluctant to modify the >> preparser unless it's strictly necessary. >> An argument in favor of changing it would be Sage's mission: >> "Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, >> Mathematica and Matlab." >> If Sage is going to be an alternative to Matlab, it would be a >> precondition that matrix input were easy. In Matlab it's pretty easy >> to enter matrices, so changing the preparser would make Sage more >> usable as an alternative to Matlab. > > If we take this so literally we would end up with either (a) 4 different > ways of doing anything mirroring the syntax of each of Magma, Maple, > Mathematica and Matlab or (b) only the intersection of the four systems, > which I think is pretty tiny.
Since I made up the mission statement of Sage, there is one thing I like to clarify about it. The goal is *not* to make Sage a (mostly) language-compatible drop-in replacement for all four systems, in the sense that Octave (sort of) tries to be a mostly drop-in replacement for Matlab. Thus it is very much not the mission of Sage to parse all four languages: Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. Similarly, Sage does not have to have its own domain specific languages that are as easy to use as each of the Ma's in all cases. -- William -- 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
