On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 1:39 PM, Volker Braun <vbraun.n...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thursday, June 2, 2016 at 5:34:49 PM UTC+2, William wrote: >> >> (1) No matter your grammar argument about deficiencies in the >> technical language, it's a fact that the majority of English speakers >> is going to consider this confusing. > > > The majority of English speakers will be perfectly unaware of the difference > between Python list and tuple anyways.
You're probably right -- I actually meant the majority of English speaking Python users, not all English speakers. >> (2) Tuples aren't really immutable either, in that if their entries >> are mutable, then they are overall mutable. > > > And even if the entries aren't mutable you can always attach a debugger and > write into memory. Your point being? Suppose that our object X has a basis consisting of four 2x2 matrices, in some abstract sense. Then your X.list() might very well return a tuple of four *mutable* 2x2 matrices. Then this X.tuple() is still very much mutable, and the original problem has not been solved. I guess that's my point. In this case the obvious solution is to explicitly make the basis matrices returned by X.list() immutable. Making X.list() return a tuple doesn't solve this problem at all. Making list(X) and X.list() return different things definitely violates the "principle of least surprise". I made this mistake once before with matrices, in which X.list() returns a list of all the entries of the matrix, whereas list(X) returned the rows. This is totally my fault, definitely wrong, and its' in Sage right now. I would like to strongly urge you to not make the same mistake again (OK, my mistake with matrices is definitely worse than this list/tuple thing, by far). ~$ sage-develop ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ SageMath version 7.3.beta2, Release Date: 2016-05-28 │ │ Type "notebook()" for the browser-based notebook interface. │ │ Type "help()" for help. │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Warning: this is a prerelease version, and it may be unstable. ┃ ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛ A = matrix(2,[1..4]) A.list() sage: A = matrix(2,[1..4]) sage: A.list() [1, 2, 3, 4] sage: list(A) [(1, 2), (3, 4)] sage: -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
