Le jeudi 12 mai 2011 à 16:06 -0700, Ondrej Certik a écrit :
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Aaron Meurer <asmeu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi.
> >
> > There was a discussion over at
> > http://code.google.com/p/sympy/issues/detail?id=1721 to rename the
> > Real class to Float, because the name fits the class better. The
> > reasoning is that Real represents floating point numbers, not any real
> > number like sin(1) or 2*pi, and it is confusing to have the subtle
> > difference between Real and real in the docs. See the discussion over
> > at that issue page for more info.
> >
> > How do people feel about this? If it were to happen, it would happen
> > in the next release, which also breaks some other things in terms of
> > backwards compatibly.
>
> It seems that most code uses some variation of Real already:
>
> Sage: uses RealField and RealLiteral:
>
> sage: a = 1.345
> sage: type(a)
> <type 'sage.rings.real_mpfr.RealLiteral'>
>
>
> Mathematica uses "Real":
> http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Real.html
And their "Possible issues" section can be summed up with "Reals aren't
reals, reals aren't Reals". Do we need to repeat others' mistakes?
Anyway, both Python and numpy call floats "float" which, I think, trumps
compatibility with Sage and Mathematica. Maple and Maxima use "float" as
well.
> And given that it would break compatibility, it seems to me that it's
> not worthy to make the change.
If you look at the tree for 0.6.7, it seems to be used less often than
the syntax symbols('xyz') which will be forbidden in 0.7.0, apparently.
Not to mention the Basic/Expr split that is bound to break a lot of code
in ways that won't always be easily fixed.
For me, this is a big flaw that confuses users and devs on a crucial
matter for sympy: the difference between symbolic and numeric
computation. I certainly think it's worth the small increase in
compatibility breaking.
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