On 7 March 2015 at 08:50, Simon King <simon.k...@uni-jena.de> wrote: > On 2015-03-07, Volker Braun <vbraun.n...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Saturday, March 7, 2015 at 3:36:18 AM UTC+1, William wrote: >>> >>> I tend to agree -- Having rank be removed or raise an error and >>> suggest that if they want to compute ranks they must use an exact ring >> >> >> Its still educational, to teach about floating point computation and so on. >> We could raise a warning... > > I agree. I think a warning message menntioning appropriate methods over > inexact fields and advising to use exact rings would be ideal.
I think that many users would consider 1.2 to be an exact number. I have certainly had to explain to students that if the answer to an exact calculation is 6/5 then it is better not to convert to decimal, despite what they were taught at school. Of course I understand what floating point numbers are, so don't bother telling me! But at school, and in mathematics (as opposed to computational mathematics), 1.2 and 6/5 are two different ways of writing the exact same number. We cannot really win with this one. From what I wrote above it is tempting to convert "simple" decimal literals into some exact ring on input, but then someone will input 0.333 and be disappointed that Sage did not guess that they meant 1/3. John > > Best regards, > Simon > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-devel" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
