Thanks for all the comments, links on gap and Sage. Rob, the two tracs on abelian groups and unit groups of rings are just what we were wondering about. We'll look at them and see if we can do something. Please do send the worksheet you mentioned on unit groups. What was the difficulty with subgroups?
Some questions: [A warning: I'm not that adept with computational software, so some questions may be naive. I'm relying on smart students on this project!] A fundamental issue is not clear to us: To what extent functionality for groups be sent via libgap to gap, vs doing things in Sage itself? Would the longterm (or midterm) goal be to have the Sage groups package be mainly an efficient conduit to gap? How should the different kinds of groups interact? Finitely presented groups, matrix groups, abelian groups, permutation groups, unit groups of rings--each has its own type of efficient representation. Suppose I want to take a unit group of a finite ring and "coerce" it into an abelian group to find its elementary divisors. (Or the same with the center of some matrix group.) Or suppose I want to to write a finite matrix group as a permutation group. How should this been done? How does it relate to the python class structure? Is this already done in gap, and we just take advantage of gap capabilities? Related issue: As Dima mentioned functionality of the different types of groups is not consistent. Are we looking for consistency at a high level, using the same names for functions, or at a deeper code level? -- 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
