On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 11:39 PM, Jori Mäntysalo <jori.mantys...@uta.fi> wrote: > 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.)
I think it is *highly* unlikely that undergraduates use Sage (or anything) from the command line. In my own surveys, most undergrads never touch the command line. > > ...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. You have a very good point. > >> 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.) Sounds like great ideas. I can't believe TESTS is still not foldable!? Woah -- that was the plan like 8 years ago and it's not done. Oops. William -- William (http://wstein.org) -- 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.
