On Jul 7, 2007, at 10:44 AM, William Stein wrote: > The first is *removing* having predefined symbolic variable > names. I.e., in SAGE right now the variables a..z and A..Z > are prdefined at startup to be symbolic variables (except for I > and e).
+1 for nothing but e, I, and x defined by default. This has caused me much more frustration than it has helped. (There should be an easy way to import all of a-z,A-Z however). Ideally, e would be an element of a "lazy real" field, x an element of ZZ['x'] (if I want to do something quick, having x handy is really nice, and almost everyone tries to create/factor/integrate a polynomial the first time they try SAGE), and I an element of the Gaussian integers. Having to define these every time does get tedious. > (2) how annoying it was not having decimal literals be floats by > default, and -1. I've probably given you enough feedback on this matter already... > (3) how annoying it was having certain special functions, e.g., > log, sin, cos, etc., return symbolic values by default > instead of numerical values. I mostly to agree here that sin(1) = 0.841470984807897 is more useful, but one concern is how one would get the symbolic "sin(1)" if one wanted it. Regarding (2), would the return value be float? Could one specify the precision? Would "asin(sqrt(3)/2)" still be pi/3? (I think so.) What about sqrt? I don't think that behavior should revert back to a floating point. Maybe have two ways to call the function/two functions (one symbolic like now, one numeric)? - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
