On 11/13/10 12:38 PM, Tom Boothby wrote:
I agree, John. It would be better to define a .sum() method on the generic vector class, which calls the global sum(). Then, it'll be overridden by various classes which can do it faster.
If we're now making a convention for the global sum function (i.e., try calling the .sum() method first), I'm curious how many other objects have a .sum() method? Will this break things? This question not only holds for Sage stuff, but for any library out there. Since we are talking about changing the behavior of a standard python function (sum), I can see a lot of confusion if sum(object) starts behaving differently because object happens to have an object.sum() method.
For that reason, I think the magic method that sum() tries should be something more obscure, like ._sum_sage() or something like that. Then it would be much more unlikely to mess up objects out there that happened to have .sum() methods.
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