William Stein wrote: > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Peter Doyle (a Professor at Dartmouth) > Date: Sep 18, 2007 10:32 AM > Subject: Re: Calculus > To: William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Hi William, > >> There was a long thread on sage-devel about this: >> >> > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/674e88887d0da278 > > Thanks for pointing out this thread. Regarding range(), I was struck > by how the discussion turned to the question of basing ranges at 0 > rather than 1. Having the default lower bound 0 actually doesn't > bother me at all. The real problem as I see it is that in range(1,10) > the upper bound isn't included. This can be justified in the case of > range(10) by viewing 10 as telling not the upper bound, but the length > of the list. But in range(1,10), 10 tells neither the length of the > list nor the upper bound. Or rather, it's the upper bound for a > half-open interval of integers, which is not the kind of convention > that is going to be natural for mathematicians or calculus students. > Mathematicians *could* have defined $\sum_{i=1}^{10}$ not to include > the upper limit in the sum. Only that's just not how we do it. >
Why not define a new function srange (short for sagerange), or redefine the existing srange function: def srange(a,b=None,step=1, include_endpoint=True): or something like that. See sage: srange?? Alternative: reuse xrange this function will be removed from Python in Python3000. > This is not to say that I think you necessarily have to make this > addition to the preparser. I think using Python was an inspired > decision, and is responsible for the fact that SAGE is so great. I > can see why you would not want to deviate from it without a compelling > reason. Not yet, anyway: Maybe after all the hackers have moved on > to Ruby (and then Topaz, and then Tourmaline...), leaving Python > (i.e., SAGE) to the mathematicians. > Diamonds are forever! 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
