On Wednesday, January 20, 2016 at 1:04:49 PM UTC-8, John Cremona wrote: > > > Is there any reason to not make GF(16) behave as GF(16,'x') does, > > unless specified otherwise? I do not see the point of requesting the > > user to provide a character if (s)he does not care. > > > > +1 for having a default, though I would choose 'a'. > > There is a potential confusion there:
sage: ZX.<x>=ZZ[] sage: ZY.<y>=ZZ[] sage: F=GF(16,'x') sage: R=F['x,u,v'] sage: S=F['y,u,v'] sage: S(x).degree() 0 sage: R(x).degree() 1 sage: S(y).degree() 1 sage: R(y).degree() 0 This is actually a bit of a mess: generator names are supposed to be used in figuring out coercion maps, but currently this doesn't seem to happen too much with GF(p^r) . [Really, F(y) should be an error, because it's totally not clear where y should go]. So currently, having a default name in GF doesn't seem to be too much of an issue because GF violates normal coercion rules. However, if this were fixed then a default generator name (especially when it's something usual such as x) would lead to odd interactions with coercions from various structures. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
