On 09/21/10 09:49 PM, mda_ wrote:
On Sep 21, 10:39 am, "Dr. David Kirkby"<[email protected]>
wrote:
On 09/21/10 06:12 PM, Niles wrote:
I'd just like to comment that, if the wording "nearest Mathematica
equivalent" is going to be an essential part of this, then it should
be very carefully chosen, and probably implemented through some
Maybe "nearest" is not appropriate. Perhaps "similar" or something like that, so
it avoids any arguments about what is similar and what is not.
How about "close analogue".
No, I don't like that. If nothing else, it will be more confusing to those whose
first language is not English, and even though mine is, I don't like that term.
As you've said or alluded to, without a
full transformation of the grammar, it's not a "Natural
Transformation"/functor if I'm using the correct maths terminology.
If we were writing a Sage -> Mathematica converter, or a Mathematica -> Sage
converter, then clearly we would need to be very precise over this. But if
someone uses NIntegrate[] in Mathematica, they would probably want to know what
commands are related in Sage. It might be only "integrate" but there might be
others. At that point they know what commands it would be worth using the help
system for.
Nobody can expect the commands to be identical - except for trivial ones like
Sin[], Cos[]. In the case of factor() there are two very obvious Mathematica
commands that provide broadly similar functionality.
Since Mma doesn't post it's BNF (Grammar), it's an exercise in reverse
engineering.
-Don
But we don't need that for documentation. I'd be quite keen to have Sage read
Mathematica input, or at least some sort of converter. Then one needs to be a
lot more accurate about the differences between commands. But for documentation
like this, we don't need it. There's no need to reverse engineer anything.
Dave
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