On Oct 22, 2009, at 5:42 PM, John H Palmieri wrote: > > On Oct 22, 5:11 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Well like it or not, it is a fact that 0.0^0.0 = 1 *is* the official >> ISO 99 standard. Note that ISO = "international standards >> organization". >> >> I'm not making an argument here for or against this. But there is no >> arguing with it being an official standard as dictated by an >> international standards organization for perhaps the worlds most >> popular programming language (C/C++). > > There is a question about whether we, as mathematicians, should > automatically accept as standards something designated for use in a > programming language. I know that Sage is a programming environment, > but shouldn't it reflect mathematical truth, not computer programming > standards?
I actually remember going through and fixing a whole bunch of rings that didn't raise errors on 0^0--most of them were just an oversight. (I think Tom Boothby was there too...) For Integers this was explicitly changed back to be like Python and MPFR http://hg.sagemath.org/sage-main/diff/fa97eed25973/sage/rings/integer.pyx . I'd rather have an error in most cases (especially for finite fields) but consistency with the (Python) environment does have its merits, if just to reduce confusion. - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
