On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 1:18 AM, Robert Bradshaw
<rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 6:56 PM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On May 12, 4:26 pm, Harald Schilly <harald.schi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thursday, May 10, 2012 5:28:38 PM UTC+2, 3DRaven wrote:
>>>
>>> > There is a suggestion to developers. The construction of
>>> > x = var('x')
>>> > solve(x^2 + 3*x + 2, x)
>>> > is inconvenient and not beautiful. Can do whatever in the sage of any
>>> > uninitialized variable was considered a symbolic?
>>>
>>> in the notebook (and only there), you can execute
>>> automatic_names(True)
>>> once. Then, it does what you want.
>>>
>>> The remaining discussion about x vs. y is just a good example that Sage is
>>> not 100% pure - as Kini would like :)
>>> It is also influenced by a tradeoff for general usability.
>>
>> Exactly. To take Keshav's idea, I'm okay with "duping" people with
>> multivariable functions in this way; it seems like the same thing, but
>> in practice I've found that people who make it beyond the first few
>> things to try in Sage are already hooked enough that this seems much
>> less onerous. Certainly no less so than the "dot" notation, though
>> I'm hesitant to do the automatic_names thing too much due to typo
>> proliferation.
>>
>> Actually, I think it's silly that we have to declare variables for
>> said plots, provided that we require variables in the ranges in that
>> case. So, on startup, why couldn't
>>
>> sage: implicit_plot(x == y^2, (x,-1,1), (y,-1,1), color='puce')
>>
>> work? Must be a way to preparse that. If there was a list of
>> specific places where it's very annoying to do this and they could all
>> be preparsed away (since the "f(x) = ..." notation solves a lot of
>> those problems), it might be possible to get rid of 'x'; however, it
>> seems more worth maintaining a pretty reasonable concession which has
>> lasted for nearly all of Sage's existence outside of the number theory
>> world, which is only really troubling to people who definitely have
>> the skills to bypass it :)
>
> And even in the "number theory world" it's handy to have at least one
> indeterminate right away, e.g. for defining number fields. Sage is
> pragmatic, not always pure.
>
> - Robert
Much of number theory is *very* one-dimensional, so having exactly one
variable makes good sense to (some of) us number theorists.
William
>
> --
> 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
