I think all this discussion is great. I don't mean to change topics but one other subject should be addressed: easy to understand error messages. A long traceback is fine but at the end, something to help explain to the user what they probably did wrong is also important.
The comments what Maple/Mma are doing things right and we should emulate them reminds me of the following story: years ago an Ivy league school had everyone use one of these in calculus. It got so frustrating that some enterprising students made some money selling "F*** M." t-shirts (where I think you can fill in the blanks). This was years ago, and I'm not trying to put anyone or product down, just an amusing illustration of the frustrations we want to try to avoid. I really believe that because of the talented and inventive programmers working on SAGE, we can actually do better than both. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ On 12/6/06, Joel B. Mohler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Wednesday 06 December 2006 17:16, William Stein wrote: > > 3. A substitution rule (?), which I guess doesn't have > > any analogue in Python. I was confused before and didn't know > > about 2 (above) and thought 3 was the only way to define a function. > > Calculus rules don't make sense for these, but they can be > > evaluated. > > > > In[36]:= z[x_, y_] := Sin[x+y] > > > > In[37]:= z[2,3] > > > > Out[37]= Sin[5] > > Actually, you can do calculus with these too. > In[12]:= f[x_]:=Sin[x] > In[13]:= f'[x] > Out[13]= Cos[x] > In[14]:= f'[y] > Out[14]= Cos[y] > > Of course, I don't believe the prime notation is an option for our python > (with-out *very* ugly preparsing). > > -- > Joel > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
