2012/12/3 John H Palmieri <jhpalmier...@gmail.com>: > See > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/palmieri/misc/6495-jsmath/html/en/reference/index.html > for what the reference manual might look like if > http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6495 is every merged into Sage. Do > you like that any better?
I do ! I think it would help to make SAGE easier to get acquainted with (especially for people like me accustomed to another CAS). My next remarks may be more a matter of personal taste. I used to teach Maple to undergrads, and I use a specific subset of SAGE functionnality on a daily basus, so that I may be a bit biased. I still think that MAGMA's "handbook" is easier to browse than SAGE's reference manual (both are supposed to exhaustively describe all the functions in the system). One reason for that is probably that in SAGE, we auto-generate the manual... But still, there might be a few things we could do to help, e.g. #6495. My generic opinion is that the most frequently used mathematical objects should be the easiest to find in the reference manual (think of it as Huffman coding...). For instance, it is close to impossible to find "vector spaces" in the reference manual. This has puzzled and annoyed me for a while! I now realize that this is because we don't have a "VectorSpace" class, and that we instead have "FreeModules", which are more generic. The thing is that most, if not all, undergrads looking to play with vector spaces will not know that they should in fact look for FreeModule's. Wouldn't it be possible to work around that, and make the reference manual a bit more "non-advanced-mathematicians-friendly" ? Comparing with the MAGMA handbook again, I think that their design decision to expose "basic rings and linear algebra" as one of the first titles of their manual is a very good one. It has certainly helped me learning MAGMA quickly... Charles -- 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.
