On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 7:17 AM, Jason Grout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> kcrisman wrote:
>> Referring to http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/3212, I have to
>> do a little cleaning up before submitting it for review, but have some
>> code for allowing rescaling of matrices by "logical" scalars not in
>> the base ring.  However, in order to do this, I need to return a copy,
>> not modify the original, and robertwb raises the point that perhaps
>> then rescale_row etc. should *always* return a copy, for
>> consistency.
>
> +1 to always returning a copy.

Do you have any idea what making this change is going to do to
the generic echelonize() command?  It's just not going to work at all
or be insanely slow.

> If *anything* is returned, I would expect it to be a copy.
>
> Note that one convention that I have observed in python is to return
> None if an object is modified by a method.  You see this in the sort()
> method for lists, for example.  We have also tried to follow this
> convention in the graph theory code (and we've had this discussion
> before when contemplating changing the graph theory code).

It's not just a convention.  In the Python language *all* functions return
a value whether you use the return command or not.  If you don't they
default to returning None.

William

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