Hi William,

Sorry, not this time as I'm travelling and only stumbled over this when 
checking my emails. I hope someone else can do it.

Cheers
Stan

William Stein wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Stan Schymanski <schym...@gmail.com 
> <mailto:schym...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     Hm, since we wanted to get away from implicit functions, the
>     consistent
>     think to do would be to always require the base when a user wants
>     to use
>     the log function. I think that this could avoid some confusion. 
>
>
> I think that would be too cumbersome.
>  
>
>     In every
>     CAS, I have to check in the documentation what the program means by
>     log(x). In sage I had to read through the whole doc string and get to
>     the examples before I was able to deduce that log(x) is the
>     natural log
>     of x:
>
>
> As you point out below, that can be fixed by making a clear statement 
> about this part of the first sentence.
>  
>
>
>
>     Type:           function
>     Base Class:     <type 'function'>
>     String Form:    <function log at 0xf5f4df0>
>     Namespace:      Interactive
>
>     Definition:     log(x, base=None)
>     Docstring:
>
>            Return the logarithm of x to the given base.
>
>            Calls the ``log`` method of the object x when computing
>            the logarithm, thus allowing use of logarithm on any object
>            containing a ``log`` method. In other words, log works
>            on more than just real numbers.
>
>            TODO: Add p-adic log example.
>
>            EXAMPLES::
>
>                sage: log(e^2)
>                2
>                sage: log(1024, 2); RDF(log(1024, 2))
>                10
>
>     I think that the doc string should say that log(x) = log(x,e) right at
>     the beginning.
>
>
> I very strongly agree.    Any chance you could be convinced to submit 
> a patch to do this?
>
> William
>
>
>
> -- 
> William Stein
> Associate Professor of Mathematics
> University of Washington
> http://wstein.org
>
> >


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