On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 1:33 PM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > 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?
The standard argument against preparser stuff like this is that you have to be careful to not use it when writing .py code for the Sage core library. But at least this matrix notation will always result in a SyntaxError if used in Python code. -- William > >> > 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 -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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
