Hello Sages Last week (?) I noticed that a program I wrote was making a mistake, because f.coeffs() and f.coefficients() return very different results: the former provides a dense representation (with 0's), the second a sparse one (no 0's, correlating with f.exponents()).
I like this OK, but the help string isn't clear on this: the latter states merely, "Return the coefficients of the monomials appearing in self;" while the former states, "Returns "self.list()." " The help on self.list() states merely, "Returns a list with the coefficients of self." So the difference is that one states "monomials *appearing* in self," while the other does not clarify that it gives the monomials appearing in self, which presumably means it includes monomials *not* appearing in self. I'm not good at these kinds of inferences, so this does not immediately convey "dense" or "sparse representation," or not to me, anyway. I would propose the following: *f.coeffs?* should state something to the effect of, "Returns all the coefficients of a dense representation of f." *f.coefficients?* should state something like, "Returns all the coefficients of a sparse representation of f; that is, it returns only the non-zero coefficients, in a list correlated with f.exponents." (Notice the explicit statement of the correlation, reinforcing sparse representation.) *f.list?* should be mostly identical to f.coeffs? I'm willing to open a ticket & author a patch to this effect, if at least one other person agrees here. john perry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
