On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 07/ 5/10 06:18 AM, William Stein wrote: >> >> Great idea - you could add an algorithm="axiom" option to sage's >> integrate command. > > Personally, and I am going to dare risk argue with a mathematician, I would > not have considered Axion an algorithm, but a software package. So something > like "method=use_axiom" would seem more logical to me.
The only argument for "algorithm" is that it's a standard idiom in Sage (though with a greatly generalized meaning). > Better still if Sage behaved like Mathematica, so seamlessly switched from > one method to another, if the first one fails. As far as I know, it usually does. I'm sure that maxima tries more than one algorithm (or at least has some heuristic to figure out which way to attack the problem). Switching over to a different system is a bit different. Also, note that axiom is an optional package. > In other words, automatically > switch to Axiom if Maxima can't solve the integral - perhaps with a message > like "Unable to solve with Maxima, now trying Axiom". I would still leave the > option of someone just using Axiom though. > > One of the annoying things with Sage, is that you often need to know what > bit of software to use to do something. With Mathematica, I can request a > zero of a Bessel function - I don't need to know that I should be doing this > using mpmath or whatever else can be used for finding zeros of Bessel > functions (see recent thread on this topic) This is certainly the goal--we're just not there yet in all areas. For, e.g. (exact) linear algebra or most of number theory it chooses and uses the right components under the hood. - 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 URL: http://www.sagemath.org
