Martin Albrecht wrote: > On Tuesday 18 September 2007, John Cremona wrote: [...] >> >> Sorry if this sounds negative, but I have a feeling that sage-devel >> has more CS people in it than mathematicians! > > The main issue is: Starting at 1 cannot be done if you want to keep using > Python, i.e. not reinventing the wheel. You can change the SAGE library code > but everything core Python will still start counting at zero. Also, other > libraries you might want to use with SAGE (one of the cool things about SAGE > is that you can use it with all the other cool Python libraries) will still > start counting at 0. Introducing a couple of functions which start counting > at 1 will make things more difficult than easy. The rule: start counting at > zero is easy enough to understand, though I appreciate that it is sometimes > odd if you are working with a paper and have to fiddle with the indices. The > rule: "sometimes we start at one and often at zero" is way harder to get > IMHO. > > So if we set aside our personal preferences and backgrounds (CS and Math) for > a moment: by choosing a mainstream programming language the choice to start > counting at zero was made as well. If we are not happy about it we might need > to fork Python (this is not a proposal :-)). >
I think we should stay as close as possible to Python. And a lot of mathematicians start counting with 0 as the first natural number, including me coming from 'The Foundation of Mathematics'. See for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number > Also, the argument given above is a marketing argument. It is about > convincing > somebody to use a piece of software. I don't think it is a good idea to > change a clean, well understood and dominant design (at least in CS to be > precise) just for the purpose of convincing somebody to use a product, when > we don't even know, if [s]he's interested in it. If SAGE has the (best) tools > researchers need, they will use it. If somebody refuses to use a piece of > software because of indexing differences ... well ... I honestly wouldn't > know what to say. > +1 Jaap --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
