On Sun, Sep 04, 2016 at 03:24:05AM -0700, Dima Pasechnik wrote:
> Is there any reason for any categories to exist in the global namespace
> (besides backward compatibility, but this can be worked on) ?
> No, really, it's something that perhaps small% of Sage users have to
> use often, and such users are advanced
> enough to use import statements...
That's a good question on which I have mixed feelings.
Categories are not just a core developer thing. I believe many users,
even beginners, can/could benefit from categories for learning
purposes: what's a group? a ring?, ... Categories could further be
used more as entry points into given topics: e.g. to request the list
of all rings in Sage, maybe through something like:
Rings().catalog
For sure we already have plain catalogs for this; but they are not as
flexible when it comes to e.g. get the list of all finite commutative
rings.
Granted, work still needs to be done for the above to really apply:
having nicer documentation for the categories, and ways to explore
their properties, finalizing Florent's prototype implementation of the
catalog feature, etc.
Altogether, I believe it's nice to be able to access easily the most
common categories (Groups, Rings, ...), but I see the value of a clean
global namespace and agree that having to prefix by `categories.`
might not be too bad.
Cheers,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthi...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/
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