> A "student mode" is tempting and has been discussed in other contexts > (calculus?). I think a strength of Sage is that a student can start > with it as an undergraduate and continue to use it the remainder of > their professional careers. So for my money, I'd rather make > available the functions and methods that alleviate any confusion a > beginner might face, so that as their needs and confidence grow they > can slide into more subtle uses, rather than having to transistion > from one mode to another.
+1 I used to be an advocate of a 'student mode' of sorts, at least privately (it may have been before I was as involved with Sage), but think Rob makes well the case for not having this. That's not the same as not providing individual contexts - for instance, it might be nice to have some way to declare a variable is always real at the top of a page, and then have plot(x^(1/3)) do what one naively thinks it would do if one hadn't seen a CAS before... and we definitely need to advertise the 'magic' turning of methods into functions more, if only to track down bugs in it. - kcrisman -- 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
