On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 2:16 AM, daly <d...@axiom-developer.org> wrote: > On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 02:06 -0800, David Roe wrote: >> > As for global defaults, it's nice for both examples and debugging for >> > there to be as little global state as possible, and someone who wants >> > RDF for reals probably wants CDF for complexes. The consistency >> > argument is a good one, but changing matrix(...) would be much more >> > invasive, and both defaults have their pros and cons, so the simpler >> > syntax could be used for the simpler (i.e. more basic user that >> > doesn't want to care about baserings but just wants to slice and dice >> > some matrices) default. >> >> I agree that having very little global state is good, but right now I >> don't think that Sage is succeeding very well in our mission to >> provide a viable alternative to Matlab. I would like to see more >> users to Sage who care about floating point linear algebra, and I >> think it's worth having some global state if we can attract such >> people by making it easier to create matrices with floats. >> David >> > > Axiom associates the target type of the input so you type > a:Matrix(Integer) := [[1]] > or > b:Matrix(Float) := [[1.1]] > > or for larger values > c:Matrix(Integer) := [[1,2,3],[4,5,6]] > d:Matrix(Float) := [[1.1,2.1,3.1],[4.1,5.1,6.1]]
One can always make it explicit, e.g. matrix(QQ, [[1,2],[3,4]]) or (hypothetically) [1, 2; 3, 4; base_ring=QQ]; the question is about what to do in the implicit case. IMHO, the current default doesn't suit many users well, in particular it does disservice to those users who wouldn't even think to specify the basering. - 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
