On Jan 26, 3:19 pm, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: > On 1/26/12 12:13 PM, Robert Bradshaw wrote: > > > To get a quick sense of what people think about this, I've decided to > > rephrase this as a survey. To be clear, though this coincides with > > Matlab syntax, the intent is not to try to make Sage a Matlab clone, > > rather it is to add a missing feature to Sage. > > > Should [a, b; c, d] be a valid syntax for matrix construction in Sage? > > > [ ] Yes, I love this syntax! It would be make life better for me and > > my students. > > [ ] I wouldn't oppose, but may require some convincing. > > [ ] No, that's a horrible idea. > > I waffle between Yes, and Yes with convincing. I'm trying it out now to > see how I feel about it. I feel like we shouldn't extend python too > much, but this syntax is very tempting.
Why *not* use it? > > Should the default basering be more linear-algebra friendly? E.g. R -> > > Frac(R), RR -> RDF. > > > [ ] Yes, that would take away a lot of pain/be what I'd have to > > specify manually anyway. > > [ ] Could be handy, but the drawbacks are significant. > > [ ] No, matrices over QQ are for sissies, real mathematicians work > > over ZZ unless otherwise specified. > > I should just note several areas that ZZ matrices come up short > (intuitively) when you assume you are usually working over fields: > > sage: a=[1,2; 3,4] > sage: a[0,0]=1/2 > (error...) > sage: a.rational_form() > (error...) > sage: a.rescale_row(1/2) > (error...though the error message is a little more helpful and says to > use with_rescaled_row...) > But we've at least done some work with this, dating back to some of my first patches, and the great rref() which you guys all implemented. So I don't know that we should change this behavior, as convenient as it would be for my purposes. -- 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
