On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:13 AM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >>> I assume this is known, but I am wondering whether it should be >> >>> treated as a bug, >> >> >> This is not a bug. It's a stupid design decision in Python, which we > > Right, I knew that Python ints behaved this way, I was just surprised > that somehow in Sage / didn't change this - I guess it's because most > integer input gets preparsed to Integer, right? > >> >> Trust me, I understand that Python's int floor division sucks. I'm >> >> teaching undergrads about stats using Sage now, and the most obvious >> >> line of code to compute the mean of a list gets the answer totally >> >> wrong because of this problem. This already caused a lot of >> >> confusion. > > Luckily I haven't had that problem - just my own getting weird answers > just now! > >> > Good point, I hadn't though about that. We could introduce a size() >> > or cardinality() method that returns an Integer, or possibly infinity. > > That sounds useful; there are already other things that have > cardinality() implemented, right? > >> We could also redefine len. > > I'm not touching that one! :)
Well it's really just random chance that I didn't redefine len in sage.all back in 2005. If I had, then len would likely still be redefined now and we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'm not sure this isn't a good idea. I just don't know. It's a question of pros versus cons, and so far I see more pros than cons. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
