Though I am against having all single-letter symbolic variables
defined, I want to put a comment in for having a well-populated
global namespace at startup. I like this so I can get right to work
with out having to import a bunch of stuff too (let alone remember
where things are). This is especially true of the notebook, where
when I restart I would have to remember to go to the right cell(s)
and re-import everything (often the case when doing development). I
think the key is the lack of ambiguity: unlike, say, "a" or "f" or
"E" which may mean different things depending on what I'm working on,
I always want "EllipticCurve" to stand for the one in sage/schemes/
elliptic_curves/constructor.py. It also makes it a lot easier to
explain how to do things to newcomers and get them going quickly
(which, hopefully, will be a large percentage of SAGE users for some
time to come).
That being said, I don't want to fill the global namespace with
everything possible, but I think (with the OO nature of Python) one
should be able to do all but the most technical things without having
to type an import statement.
- Robert
On Jul 10, 2007, at 2:20 PM, David Harvey wrote:
>
> I don't really like the idea of "modules that imitate various
> environments", i.e. I don't think it's possible or desirable for us to
> try to look specifically like any other system. Mathematica semantics
> are so different from SAGE's, it would be misleading to suggest
> anything like that. But I *do* like the idea of the clean initial
> namespace, which gets subsequently polluted on demand when
> requested by
> the user.
>
> david
>
> On Jul 11, 2007, at 7:15 AM, Hamptonio wrote:
>
>>
>> Perhaps it would help to start with a fairly clean namespace and then
>> have some modules which would imitate various environments. So for
>> example, there might be a simple command like:
>>
>> set_style('mathematica')
>>
>> which would define the N() function, and some other favorite
>> mathematica functions. Conceivably it would even change the behavior
>> of symbolic objects so that 1.0*sin(1) would evaluate to a numerical
>> answer, although that seems like more of a pain to implement.
>>
>> -Marshall
>>
>
>
>
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