Also +1 for keeping. Many people which are more familiar with Matlab expect this behavior in Sage too. (I recently introduced Sage to some people) Of course it's safer to specify the variable, but if I need to I can do it. I think this should always be a users choice and never the choice of the designers. I never understand the argumentation that someone somewhere somehow could create troubles. That's the reason why I hate Java...
regards, -Stefan On Jan 25, 7:36 am, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 10:13 PM, Dan Drake <dr...@kaist.edu> wrote: > > What's the current thinking regarding derivative() and functions of a > > single variable? Right now, you don't need to specify a variable if the > > function only depends on one variable, so the following works: > > > sage: f(x) = x^3 + 1 > > sage: derivative(f) > > x |--> 3*x^2 > > sage: f.derivative() > > x |--> 3*x^2 > > > ...but I've heard that some people would like to change that, so that in > > all cases it would be necessary to specify the variable. What's the > > status of that? > > > This came up on ticket #10678, and is related to an article we're > > working on. The article will be around for a while (we hope!), so if the > > derivative() function is going to change, we want to know about it. > > I say +1 to keeping this behavior. > > - Robert -- 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
