I am an example for someone that does use both modes. I do symbolic derivations and transformations and then apply them to data, so I fancy a system where both symbolic evaluations and numerical approximations can be done transparently. If one is only interested in numerical evaluations, why not use e.g. Octave? In my opinion, installing only a set of numerical tools or only a set of symbolic tools in Sage would amount to crippling a great piece of software, so if such an option was made possible we should make sure that a message is plastered all over the interface to make sure people don't confuse this with the real Sage.
I apologise in advance if I misunderstood the context of this thread. Cheers Stan Pablo Angulo wrote: >> It's all about acquiring a bigger audience in the applied fields. >> There is certainly the impression out there that Sage is MAINLY a CAS >> system (as opposed to a numerical system), and more geared towards >> pure mathematicians than engineers, physicists, and applied >> scientists. A separate and clear way to configure or to download an >> engineering version (say through a separate webpage), that is well >> advertised, would go a long way in helping Sage as a whole. Just my >> humble opinion. >> > I found some of sage features a bit of a mess the first times I did > numerical computation in sage, like using Reals and Integers instead of > float or ints, or using rationals and symbolic expressions for radicals. > > But I think a numerical mode would be a better choice. Selecting python > in the drop list gets you closer to that, but it still yields the > symbolic sqrt(2) instead of the numerical approximation, for example. > > Just loading math.sqrt instead of sqrt and taking similar choices of > loaded packages would be enough for me, with same interface and package > base. Like me, I think many people would use one mode or the other, > depending on the task, so installing both the standard and the applied > versions would not be saving any space. > > Regards > Pablo > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
