So, maybe some background I should have included somewhere along the way. I'm adding significant amounts of Sage code to my open source linear algebra textbook and am working hard to make the linear algebra code more welcoming to beginners (and thanks to those who have been helping).
The confusion (obvious above) is one thing I wanted to tackle. The patch at http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/10501 deprecates adjoint in favor of adjugate. It requires one change in the crypto code (inverting an integer matrix) and two or three changes to code within quadratic forms routines. But it does introduce new confusion, such as getting a quadratic form adjoint, via the adjugate, which is implemented with PARI's matadjoint method. I have no good source for the term adjugate (but don't have my books handy lately) and don't like the word much myself. Having taught a "matrix analysis" course twice now, it seems that adjoint is what gets used regularly for the conjugate-transpose, so that is my motivation. I'll admit the distinction between matrices and operators is less interesting to me. I didn't think properties were going to fly, but they are close to ready at #8094. I could probably live with a conjugate_transpose method (#10471) and the new H property as a less cumbersome version. Then I would document Sage's use of the adjoint carefully in the textbook (and maybe in some docstrings) rather than waiting for it to come out of a deprecation waiting period. My one reservation is that beginners get very confused about why, for example, A.tranpose() is correct, yet A.transpose is not. Having A.H work seems to just add to that misunderstanding. (I'm not against properties, I just would not use them with beginners.) Strong opinions welcome, otherwise Gonzalo and I will come to some agreement and move on. Rob -- 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
