On 05/12/2012 08:19 AM, Keshav Kini wrote:
>
> The latter conversation is an approximation of one that I had about five
> times near the beginning of our semester-long Sage class for
> undergraduates last fall, and which I'm sure other tutors for the class
> must have gone through as well with other students. While I might be
> underestimating the number of people who would drop Sage because of
> needing to type var('x'), I suspect you may be underestimating the
> number of people who dump Sage when they find out about var('y') once
> they get home, and realize they've been duped! :P
>
(Hijacking because I deleted the rest of the thread)
I agree that having 'x' predefined is convenient, but think that
consistency is better in the long run.
I often open up a sage prompt while I'm writing python code just to see
if some idea I had will work at all. I usually do something stupid like,
sage: p = plot(x,x,0,1)
sage: p.<tab>
just to see the methods on a plot. It's nice having 'x' predefined
there, but of course that would be fine in init.sage.
On the other hand, almost all of the examples I saw when I started using
sage relied on the predefined 'x'. It took me years to figure out all of
the different ways to declare symbolic variables (or even to realize
that there was a better way to create polynomials than by using the
default 'x').
If there was no predefined 'x', the first documentation you would run
into would (have to) tell you how to define symbolic variables, and
explain the differences between the methods. It could also explain the
polynomial thing, the different domains, etc. In the long run (I'm
thinking weeks, here), it will have been better to have learned that at
the beginning.
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