On Sunday, November 25, 2012 12:56:55 PM UTC-8, Volker Braun wrote: > > On Sunday, November 25, 2012 8:12:50 PM UTC, Nils Bruin wrote: >> >> opposed to having an instance of UCF initialized in sage by default. >> It's a very useful parent to have, but it can easily be constructed >> when required. >> > > Are we also getting rid of QQ then, since it can easily be obtained as > ZZ.fraction_field()? > > We are talking about the Sage command line here, anything that is of use > should be accessible in as few keystrokes as possible. Since Python is > totally free-form there is virtually no drawback from having stuff pulled > into the global namespace on the command line. If you don't like it you can > still use E or UCF for whatever else you want without any consequence. This > is not like C/C++ namespace pollution where the available namespace shrinks. >
I have at least two questions: - will anyone have any idea what "E" would do from the Sage command line? Once you've seen ZZ, you can guess about QQ or RR or CC; how universally used is "E" for this mathematical object? - will people reasonably expect "E" to return something else? In a year or two, will someone else have a conflicting suggestion about what E should mean? There is a drawback to adding things to the global namespace if the name is ambiguous or uninformative. "UCF" looks much better to me than "E" because of this. -- John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
