On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 3:01 AM, Paul Sargent<psa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 13 Jul 2009, at 17:13, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
>
>> In general, we try to avoid modifying the preparser as much as
>> possible. Sometimes, we really have to
>>
>> sage: eval("1/2 + 3^2")
>> 1
>>
>> is really not acceptable (IMHO) for a serious alternative to other
>> systems out there
>
> I know what you're getting at, but that's a rather cheeky example. '^'
> is the python XOR operator. '**' is the python exponent operator. To
> be honest, I'm not sure why sage re-writes '^' as '**'. As long as
> there's an operator that does the job, everything is good IMHO.Your perspective might change if you imagine giving colloquium talks to college teachers who have all used Mathematica + Latex for years, where "^" means exponent and "/" means divide (not floor divide). In my experience (having given dozens of such talks), such an audience would consider ^ not working "right" to be a "deal breaker" for many of them, and would not consider switching to Sage. > The bigger point about the pre-parser is reasonable though. It should > only do what's unavoidable (for appropriate values of "unavoidable"). +1 William > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
