To get a quick sense of what people think about this, I've decided to rephrase this as a survey. To be clear, though this coincides with Matlab syntax, the intent is not to try to make Sage a Matlab clone, rather it is to add a missing feature to Sage.
Should [a, b; c, d] be a valid syntax for matrix construction in Sage? [ ] Yes, I love this syntax! It would be make life better for me and my students. [ ] I wouldn't oppose, but may require some convincing. [ ] No, that's a horrible idea. Why? Should the default basering be more linear-algebra friendly? E.g. R -> Frac(R), RR -> RDF. [ ] Yes, that would take away a lot of pain/be what I'd have to specify manually anyway. [ ] Could be handy, but the drawbacks are significant. [ ] No, matrices over QQ are for sissies, real mathematicians work over ZZ unless otherwise specified. Why? On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 6:12 AM, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: > On 1/26/12 7:54 AM, Marco Streng wrote: >> >> 2012/1/26 Jason Grout<jason-s...@creativetrax.com>: >>> >>> That's part of the problem pointed out in an earlier message---our RR >>> matrices really are pretty bad for numerical things, but RDF matrices are >>> the way to go (the RDF matrices use standard numerical algorithms for the >>> most part, whereas RR matrices use naive algorithms that can be really >>> bad >>> and slow). This should be fixed, but for right now, RR matrices don't >>> seem >>> to be all that useful compared to RDF matrices. >> >> >> Is RDF always better than 53-bit RR in this way? If so, perhaps >> "RealNumber" or the preparser could be changed to use RDF if the >> precision is sufficiently small. Most users typing 12.345 will want >> the fastest implementation and not something generic. > > > No, this is a linear algebra problem, not a general problem in Sage. Usually > RR is better mathematically than RDF. > > Thanks, > > Jason > > > > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
