Hi! If we say that Sage Integers and Rationals should comply with Python's requirements, then for consistency, the same should hold for elements of integral domains respectively of their fraction fields.
In particular, the required element methods of QuotientFields() should be removed and instead one should require numerator and denominator element proporties (if that's possible) for IntegralDomains(). Inside the Sage library, either solution is doable with a different amount of effort. The questions are: - To what extent each solution breaks external code? - Are these backwards incompatibilities acceptable? Currently a modification of Mark's suggestion 3. (perhaps including 2.) makes most sense to me: - Change numerator and denominator of *all* integral domain elements (not just integers and rationals) into properties, also taking into account the stuff required by categories. - Make integers and rationals callable, returning themselves and raising a deprecation warning. - (Perhaps) add numer and denom methods. Rationale: In external code, I guess the most common use case of numerator and denominator methods is for rationals. Hence, the damage to external code would be minimised by preserving backwards compatibility for Rationals. And after some deprecation period we would achieve a consistent behaviour for all kindes of fraction field elements compliant with python numbers. 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/qhmv26%247qm2%241%40blaine.gmane.org.
