> I agree those things are a problem. I think I know why it was done: > > Transposition of a matrix is often written as M^T . It's difficult to > support that syntax, so using M.T seems like a nice approximation. Once you > have that, doing the same for conjugate and conjugate-transpose is a small > step. And now that we have all these properties for order-two matrix > operations, it's only natural to introduce one for inverses too.
That seems like a sensible explanation. > Given the ubiquity of tab-completion I agree that this is now probably a bad > idea. I don't know if it's bad enough to break existing code, though. > Perhaps deprecate their use? Even that has a cost. I think that such magic is bad, for all the properties (transpose, conjugate, conj-transp, inverse). It is not helpful to newcomers to Sage to see that, apparently, *some* methods on objects don't require parentheses, while almost everything else does -- such exceptions might seem convenient the first 10 seconds, but afterwards it becomes confusing. New-comers to Sage often meet matrices as one of the first things. The impression that leaves is important. In particular, they should definitely not experience exceptions to Python conventions that arise nowhere else in Sage. In the interest of moving Sage to where it should be, as fast as possible, I would vote for deprecating the behaviour. As you say, deprecation - and in the end, removal - has a cost, but the greater goal of having a coherent Sage is more important, I feel. For the record, I would be OK with supporting abbreviations of the methods (i.e. Matrix.T() == Matrix.transpose()). I don't know how/if that could be implemented simultaneously with deprecating "Matrix.T". Best, Johan -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
