On 19 Aug., 12:12, Harald Schilly <harald.schi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Friday, August 19, 2011 12:02:14 PM UTC+2, leif wrote: > > > It shouldn't be that hard to implement functions which at least > > partially translate MATLAB / Mma / whatever syntax (passed as a > > string, or from a file) to corresponding Sage expressions and > > commands, analoguous to preparse(). > > That sounds nice, but it is a dangerous way. It's not only a lot of work, > but if you don't explicitly tell new users that this system is really > _different_ they hesitate to sit on their ass a bit to learn it and also > will never fully comprehend the system and furthermore will never be > productive with it. A good example is octave, where they have to copy all > the matrix bugs of matlab just to be compatible. Do we want to copy all the > silly bugs too? If we want to be able to parse it, we would have to. I > really don't like going down that path ...
I didn't have a fully-fledged compiler (or clone) in mind, but rather some kind of "interactive tutorial" (for migrants and people taking a first look at Sage), to be used like one uses preparse() to get Sage- specific constructs "explained", but rather the inverse way, quickly giving [brief] answers to questions like: * What's the name of function / operator xy (I have in Mma, MATLAB, ...) in Sage? * How do I construct the following Mma / ... expression in Sage? We have tutorials, more or less interactive worksheets, and the reference manual, but as far as I know no cheat sheets* for users coming from the big M's, nor look-up functions other than for Sage names at the command prompt. Designing modules, classes and functions such that tab completion will eventually give some insight on a topic (like UNIX's 'apropos') is quite limited, and doesn't work at all for "foreign" functions (unless we'd put them into the namespace, which would likely be limited and IMHO a bad idea). The search_* functions aren't very appropriate either for that purpose, and the lack of type declarations makes docstrings lengthy and often necessary to read. -leif ___________________________ * I vaguely remember to have once seen some [quite old?] list / table mapping Mma function names to Sage's, but I'm not aware it is part of the Sage distribution or prominently advertised. I may be wrong of course. ;-) -- 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
