On Saturday 14 March 2009 02:45:13 pm William Stein wrote: > > William, shall we treat the case where the only variables in the > > expression is x and y specially, and allow not specifying the variables > > for the axis then? I think this makes the notation confusing and > > inconsistent. > > I have never ever even once heard of somebody complaining or being > serious confused because these pop up a plot: > > sage: > sage: plot(sin(u), (-3,3)) > sage: plot3d(x^2 + y^2, (0,3), (-2,3)) > > I have frequently seen and heard of people being confused by > > sage: x(5) > 5
Evidently, you didn't listen to me approximately 1.5 years ago then. I've been ardently opposed to the fast-and-loose handling of variables in plot & friends ever since I started using them. Most of my concrete complaints have been fixed by the addition of syntax like sage: parametric_plot((1,t),(t,-12,12)) where the key point is the allowance of 't' in the range tuple. However, if you are going to make a special case for 'x' and 'y', then, I don't know what you'd do with this sage: plot(1,(y,-5,5)) which currently produces a horizontal line from -5 to 5. I don't know what it should do. The following a truly sick collection of results (sage 3.3): sage: var('t,x,y') (t, x, y) sage: parametric_plot((1,x),(t,-12,12)) # a vertical line sage: parametric_plot((1,x),(y,-12,12)) # a vertical line Yes, those last examples are pathological and stupid, but they should give me an error so at least I know I'm stupid. -- Joel --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---