On Fri, 25 Sep 2015, William Stein wrote:
1) Should we include symbols in docstrings? I.e. add \otimes to ordinal_product() of posets, as used in Enumerative combinatorics?
IMHO, yes. They are nicely rendered in the html documentation, either in the notebook or in the reference manual pages. The only trouble is of the course the ?-help in the console mode, but this seems a minor issue since we may assume that most users understand LaTeX.
This is a questionable assumption. Numerical most users of Sage are undergraduates, and most undergraduates don't know about LaTeX.
True. On the other hand, how many undergraduates use Sage from command line?
This is a real question. Personally I always start to play with notebook, and then write a .sage if needed; I use command line only when developing and even then usually to check something. (Strange - for other things I use command line very much.)
...and hence I totally forget the command line usage. Maybe it is not meaningful to add a symbol just for showing what symbol is usually used.
The mission statement of Sage is also to be a viable alternative to Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Magma, and those systems definitely aspire to be undergraduate friendly.
True. And there has been few suggestions that would be good for that end. Like hiding TESTS-parts with foldable html manual and so on. And having an index of functions by topic, not by technical implementation with some codes in categories/* and most elsewhere... (yeah yeah, was already rejected.)
-- Jori Mäntysalo
