On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, Simon King wrote: > > On 22 Aug., 00:57, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Simon King <simon.k...@nuigalway.ie> wrote: > [...] >>> sage: print M.str() >>> but there might be nicer (and more intuitive!) ways. >> >> I think that is the only way. I can't think of any nicer way. Any idea >> what it *should* be? > > sage: M > 29 x 29 dense matrix over Integer Ring > sage: print M > [ 100 201 892 ... > > In other words: If the user types a *command* to display M, then one > can assume that (s)he really wants to see something (here: content of > M). But if M is addressed without a command, it might be better to not > confront the user with lengthy data. > > It's just a version of "explicit is better than implicit" - namely > "using a command means more than not using a command". > Therefore I believe that __repr__() should not necessarily coincide > with __str__().
One problem with this is that then one can't do "print M" and get what one expects from a non-terminal line (e.g. inside a function, or anything but the last line of a notebook cell). > Why do I think that "print M.str()" is not intuitive? Since it is > *two* commands, str() and print (without print it looks ugly). > So, better might be a method with a descriptive name such as > "prettyprint", "display", "print_all", etc. that returns None (rather > than a string) but prints M to stdout. > > One problem in that approach is that there is already show() and plot > () and so on. So, if there are too many display-related methods, it > might be difficult to tell them apart. Perhaps: show() uses graphic, > display() uses ascii art. +1 to somethign like display(). Really, there should be a way to set a threshold for something like this. - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
