Hi people, hope you don't get offended since I joined this group by simply being a pretty enthusiastic SAGE user.
I am an electronic engineer, so I try to build up myself the tool I find missing (or simply I can't catch) in this software. I am wondering what do you think about simplifying the access and use of the external packages to accomplish some very simple operations. I first say that I do intensive use of plot and symbolic analysis (calculus) routines. Example: it seems to me that there is no built-in implementation of the "collect()" function in SAGE, though there is a (seemingly) working one in SymPy. So I wrote myself a very simple function whose argument is a SAGE Symbolic Expression, that transforms it into a SymPy object (via sympify), does the collect with respect to the desired variable, and returns the desimpified object (using the _sage_ () function). What do you think about this approach? Do you prefer to keep the number of built-in function small, and to let the user to import the right packages when needed? Another example is with matplotlib. As I can read somewhere on the web, there are different opinions about using the SAGE plot capabilities rather than this external package. I had to go there because of the need to set the x axis ticks myself (that seems still not implemented). But then, which is the best way to get the interaction with this package(it is pretty boring to do all the import and Figure instantiation and saving all the time)? Is always necessary to save a png and then show it into the browser? (I always use the notebook for the moment, I also like to get the latex output... is there any viable better alternative?) One feature that I really miss, is there any chance to manage the plot results visualization as I would do with a gnuplot GUI or something like that? Something like panning and zooming back and forth, without the need to recalculate all the plot, and show it again. Are you planning for implementing something like this, or is it too far away? Last question: is there any repository of trivial functions, posted by the user? I think it would be very useful for us to compare our job (I am sure there is a lot of overlapping among users), and to improve. Moreover, that would allow developers to monitor the situation, and eventually propose for some function to be integrated upstream, or to suggest improvements to achieve that, if needed. Sorry for the long post, and keep up the good work! Please, let me know if this post is unsuited for the sage-devel list, so that I can address the support list. Regards Maurizio --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
