On 2 June 2017 at 12:17, Giampaolo Rodola' <g.rod...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 8:47 AM, Serhiy Storchaka <storch...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> What you are think about adding Unicode aliases for some mathematic names >> in the math module? ;-) >> >> math.π = math.pi >> math.τ = math.tau >> math.Γ = math.gamma >> math.ℯ = math.e >> >> Unfortunately we can't use ∞, ∑ and √ as identifiers. :-( >> >> [...] > * duplicated aliases might make sense if they add readability; in this > case they don't unless (maybe) you have a mathematical background. I can > infer what "math.gamma" stands for but not being a mathematician math.Γ > makes absolutely zero sense to me. > > There is a significant number of scientific Python programmers (21% according to PyCharm 2016), so it is not that rare to meet someone who knows what is Gamma function. And for many of them π is much more readable than np.pi. Also there is another problem, confusion between Gamma function and Euler–Mascheroni constant, the first one is Γ, the second one is γ (perfectly opposite to PEP 8 capitalization rules :-), while both of them are frequently denoted as just gamma (in particular math.gamma follows the PEP8 rules, but is counter-intuitive for most scientist). All that said, I agree that these problems are easily solved by a custom import from. Still there is something in (or related to?) this proposal I think is worth considering: Can we also allow identifiers like ∫ or √. This will make many expressions more similar to usual TeX, plus it will be useful for projects like SymPy. -- Ivan
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