Surely one problem with having a list method as in F.list() is that
the informal meaning of "give me a list of the elements of F so that I
do stuff with it" is being confused with a technical computing term
"list" which has certain properties, such as mutability.
If the method was called something else such as F.elements() then we
could return any data type we liked, such as a tuple, and the user
could easily convert that into a list if they wanted to manipulate it,
without affecting F at all.
A similar example (perhaps):
sage: E = EllipticCurve('11a1')
sage: E.a_invariants()
(0, -1, 1, -10, -20)
sage: list(E.a_invariants())
[0, -1, 1, -10, -20]
It used to be that E stored its a_invariants() as a list internally
which was returned by the E.a_invariants() method, with similarly bad
results. Now they are stored internally as a tuple.
John
On 3 June 2016 at 09:31, Jeroen Demeyer <jdeme...@cage.ugent.be> wrote:
> Alternative idea to sidestep the whole list/tuple discussion: implement a
> new type immutable_list which inherits from list. It is yet another
> container type, but it is less confusing (the thing really behaves like a
> list except that it cannot be modified).
>
> Jeroen.
>
>
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