Hi Chris, Hi List,
having slept over it, I think I have to take back my offer to write a PEP. Why?
Well, I am actually sure that it will get rejected anyways.
What I would like to have is that you can write 1/2 * m * v**2, and that can be
treated symbolically. Writing 1/2F instead looks ugly to me, and then there is
a much easier way to achieve that:
F = Fraction(1)
F*1/2 * m * v**2
that's equally ugly, but I do not need to write a single line of code.
I see that you would like to sum up the discussion in a PEP so you can point
future requesters there. But given that there are repeatedly requests here, and
over at sympy I learned they even wrote a pre-parser, not to forget André's
efforts presented here, shows that there seems to be an actual need. Telling
people: "look at that PEP, we solved that ages ago" would be dishonest, because
we did not.
In general, doing symbolic math in Python is not very beautiful. The number of
hoops you have to jump through is large, mostly because syntax is abused for
things it was not actually meant for.
It could be fruitful to add syntax for symbolic math, but this is a whole new
topic. Looking around there also seems to be not much out there, even dedicated
languages like mathematica are honestly pretty ugly.
Cheers
Martin
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