Hi Simon, I hate to sound snarky, but...
> When reading `normal form` and `Groebner basis` in the same sentence, > the meaning should be clear to anybody who took a course in commutative > algebra. So, the question is: Whom should documentation be addressed to? > > I do *not* think that documentation should always be addressed to > non-experts. I am teaching a commutative algebra class to grad students. They and I perfectly know what a Gröbner basis is. I have read many times Cox, Little and O'Shea, and I hope my students have too. Yet, none of us seems to be able to second guess what kind of normal form is actually implemented by .reduce() (Singular's kNF, actually). And from the answers to this thread, it seems to me that neither Sage devs can. So, maybe, we should at least modify the documentation so that *experts* can understand it. FTR, my question was raised by an exercise in my course book that is several (about 6?) years old, whose goal was exactly to teach the students that f.reduce([g, h]) can give different results from f.reduce([h, g]) when [g, h] is not a Gröbner basis. At some point in the past, Sage behaviour changed, and the two calls stopped giving different results for the specific f,g,h in the exercise (at least I think it used to give different results, my memory may be faulty). Luca -- 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.
