We have objects which conveniently organise examples of certain (named) mathematical objects, such as graphs<dot>, digraphs<dot> and posets<dot> (and others?). These also help keep the global namespace a little cleaner. I'd like to do the same thing with groups.
Comments are welcome as I work on this through the week at Sage Days. Right now I'm wondering how best to handle multiple representations of the same group. For example, the quaternion group of order 8 is implemented now as a permutation group, and can also be represented as a groups of matrices of size 2 over the complexes or over GF(3). Would you like to see groups.QuaternionPermutationGroup() groups.QuaternionMatrixGroupComplex() groups.QuaternionMatrixGroupGF3() or would you just like groups.QuaternionGroup() and then use keywords to get the different representations? And if so, which keywords? (representation='permutation'|'matrix'|'presentation', field='complex'|'GF(3)', degree= , etc) I'd expect for some groups, the choice of a default representation could be a matter of personal preference. It'd be nice if there was an obvious default with no keywords and perhaps annoying if you always had to supply keywords. Which is making me lean to the first suggestion above, even if it seems rather verbose. with tab-completion it might work nicely (and we don't have anyway to do tab-completion on keywords right now). Thanks, Rob -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
