On Nov 3, 2:35 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 11/3/07, John Voight <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Why must we name the generator? There are many situations that I just > > need to work with the field without naming anything. Could we agree > > on a default name, like 'a' or '$.1' or something? > > One possible idea: > > [2:34pm] was-547: I suspect people might suggest a scheme whereby one > can set a rule for global auto-generation of variable names. > [2:35pm] jvoight-1085: Yeah, as long as there's a good reason for it, > I don't really care what the ultimate answer is. > [2:35pm] was-547: E.g., one can set them to all be "a", or be > a,b,c,d,e, or a0, a1, a2, > [2:35pm] was-547: and anybody can do what they want. > [2:35pm] was-547: Then any function that needs names can get them from > that global thing.
This seems excessively complicated to me. People who care what the name is should specify a name; people who don't care don't want to even think about name generation. I suggest a default of gen_0, gen_1, ... This is deliberately a little ugly, both to reduce the chance of conflicting with the uesr's variables, and to reinforce the idea that if you want a prettier name, you should select it yourself. Carl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
