Thanks, everyone. I agree with Bruno's improvement on my suggestion. I will do this in the next few days, but I am first traveling, & I may need a reminder.
I also think the interfaces between univariate & multivariate polynomials should be brought more in line, but that seems like quite a bit of work. Perhaps we could somehow sketch a partial beginning with obvious improvements, & implement that? john perry On Wednesday, November 26, 2014 9:29:18 PM UTC+1, Bruno Grenet wrote: > > Hello John, > > As a very regular user of these functions, I think this is useful to have > both (and luckily you don't want to remove one or the other!). For the > documentation, I agree that it could and should be clearer! > > For your proposition, I am quite reluctant on using "dense" and "sparse" > in the documentation: There exist dense and sparse representations of > polynomials in Sage, and I wonder if this would not confuse users. Some may > think that f.coeffs is for densely represented polynomials and > f.coefficients for sparsely represented ones. > > I think one could use as inspiration for the documentation of > f.coefficients() the case of multivariate polynomials. It states "Return > the nonzero coefficients of this polynomials in a list." I find this > formulation clear and simple enough. It is not clear to me that one should > add the part one the correlation with f.exponents() that you proposed. > > In the same vein, I would propose "Return all the coefficients of f in a > list, including the coefficients equal to zero" for f.coeffs. > > Anyway, I agree and you can open a ticket, I'll be happy to review it! > > Cheers, > Bruno > > P.S.: On a related note, I am procrastinating for some time now the > opening of a ticket to make the interfaces of univariate polynomial rings > and multivariate polynomial rings more consistent. For instance, the > leading coefficient is f.leading_coefficient() in the former and f.lc() > in the latter. Many other things like that are a bit frustrating... > > Le 26/11/2014 21:06, john_perry_usm a écrit : > > 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+...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to sage-...@googlegroups.com > <javascript:>. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- 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.
