Hi, I just wanted to share why Sage is (or will be soon) useful for me.
1) I have a program that I do for my master thesis, it's some finite elements method + electronic structure calculations and my boss gave me access to some solaris very fast boxes, and I told him, thanks the access works, I only need to find "a while" to install scipy+numpy+pysparse+umfpack+netcdfg+mercurial. Michael Abshoff told me it's easy, but I just remember I gave up installing scipy+umfpack on some old Debian boxes in Munich, so I just installed Sage instead (it doesn't have umfpack yet though, or it didn't back then). The irony is that I comaintain scipy in Debian sid and it works like a charm in there, but when we tried to install the scipy from sid on the old debian, it pulled a hell of dependencies including libc and gcc upgrade (probably due to the recent gfortran transition in Debian) and we just didn't do it, because it would mean an upgrade to sid of the whole machine. Anyway, so when I told my boss the packages I need to install on the solaris to even get my program to run, he just replied "you need to write your program in a way so that other people can actually use it!". And he was right. So, mabshoff -- Solaris port +1. So when I get to it, hopefully soon, I think I'll start creating spkg packages of missing stuff that I need and then just use the fact that Sage just works on any system, so that other people can actually run my programs. So, none of the above has anything in common with symbolic manipulation. But one of the aims of Sage is to be a viable alternative to Matlab, so that's about it. 2) There is a nonzero chance I'll be teaching some undergrad calculus stuff in a year or two and so I was thinking which programs (if any) I'd use and the constrain will probably be windows. So, I would like to use python + sympy, because I'd like to explain how to actually do limits and integrals and derivatives on the computer (to show that actually the way it is taught at schools, for example my school, is old fashioned, because in practise, the computer uses different algorithms than those that they teach us and so one should be at least aware of this how things are done in practise), and sympy has a working pure python implementation. But then, installing python+sympy in windows is not convenient -- it's about 10 clicks with mouse and it installs somewhere to C:\Python2.5 by default and I don't understand windows much but I just get the feeling that it messes up with the registry as well and I don't like this at all. Another problem is that it installs, but then I need to start the shell (cmd.exe) and run python in it (or ipython). I would like to just download one tarball, unpack it and run it. That's it. So, mabshoff -- Sage windows port +1. Well, if I could even run my scipy+numpy linux programs in windows easily using sage, that would be awesome! So the above are rather side effects of the main Sage's aim, but those are things that would make my life much more easier. Ondrej --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
