On 5 ago, 04:31, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Alex Ghitza <aghi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 4 Aug 2010 13:21:11 -0700 (PDT), cousteau
> > <cousteaulecommand...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I agree with Simon in that developers may be reluctant to modify the
> >> preparser unless it's strictly necessary.
> >> An argument in favor of changing it would be Sage's mission:
> >> "Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple,
> >> Mathematica and Matlab."
> >> If Sage is going to be an alternative to Matlab, it would be a
> >> precondition that matrix input were easy. In Matlab it's pretty easy
> >> to enter matrices, so changing the preparser would make Sage more
> >> usable as an alternative to Matlab.
>
> > If we take this so literally we would end up with either (a) 4 different
> > ways of doing anything mirroring the syntax of each of Magma, Maple,
> > Mathematica and Matlab or (b) only the intersection of the four systems,
> > which I think is pretty tiny.
>
> Since I made up the mission statement of Sage, there is one thing I
> like to clarify about it. The goal is *not* to make Sage a (mostly)
> language-compatible drop-in replacement for all four systems, in the
> sense that Octave (sort of) tries to be a mostly drop-in replacement
> for Matlab. Thus it is very much not the mission of Sage to parse
> all four languages: Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab.
> Similarly, Sage does not have to have its own domain specific
> languages that are as easy to use as each of the Ma's in all cases.
>
> -- William
The aim of my syntax suggestion wasn't to clone Matlab's syntax, but
to provide an easy way to input matrices.
Since I'm used to Matlab (which, although can also handle symbolic
functions, is mostly oriented to numeric matrix manipulation and
system control), Sage's way to input matrices looked complicated and
inconvenient to me, although it's basically the one used by Maple and
Magma.
Of course, the aim of Sage should not be to provide a way to do things
which is similar to existing software, but to provide a way to do them
conveniently, no matter how good or bad existing software is. Of
course, if an improvement on the syntax is going to benefit only a
small number of Sage users and is going to involve big changes to the
preparser, which is tried to be kept as simple as possible to make
Sage's syntax as close to Python as possible, then the syntax
improvement wouldn't be worth the effort.
That said, the only points that are still pending are:
* a way to enter units more easily. The unit("kg m/s2") function I
suggested doesn't look too hard to make, I'll try to make it. Anyway,
it doesn't look too important; in addition, the units module is a
relatively young one on Sage.
* a function that plots the Bode diagram. Once it's possible to (1)
draw logarithmic axes, (2) align plots on a graphic array so that both
horizontal axes scales match perfectly, and maybe (3) select the
divisions on the axes (it would be nicer to have divisions each 15 or
45 degrees than each 20 or 50), the construction of the bode()
function will be trivial.
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