> > I understand that > > > f = sin(x) > > > and > > > f(x) = sin(x) > > > define two different objects in Sage. When I introduce Sage to my > > calc students, I want to get them to be able to use Sage with minimal > > confusion and technicality and to accomplish the common tasks in > > calculus, such as plotting, computing numerically and symbolically, > > simplifying, differentiating and integrating. Which one do you think > > is better? > > I think f(x) = sin(x) is better for that purpose. > > 1. You can also do f(z) = sin(z) without having to first declare z. > > 2. Plotting will *know* that z is the variable. > > 3. It emphasizes that you wish to think of the expression on the right as a > function of z.
It will also avoid annoying DeprecationWarnings for the day when f=sin (x) is no longer supported as a callable function. In 4.1.1: sage: f=sin(x) sage: f(2) /Users/.../sage/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/IPython/iplib.py: 2073: DeprecationWarning: Substitution using function-call syntax and unnamed arguments is deprecated and will be removed from a future release of Sage; you can use named arguments instead, like EXPR(x=..., y=...) exec code_obj in self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns sin(2) Although hopefully that day will never actually come for expressions with a single free variable, it sounds like it will, so for reusability's sake alone probably f(x)=sin(x) is better. - kcrisman --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
