At ticket 14231, there's a proposal to have Sage always print a message when defining a symbolic function. This is a reasonably large change to Sage's behavior, so I'd like more feedback. Also, making this change will require fixing several hundred doctests and I want to make sure people like this before I make a big patchbomb.
The proposed behavior looks like this:
sage: f(u,v)=u+v
Defining symbolic function f and symbolic variables u,v
This is accomplished, basically, by appending a string to the preparsed
command. In most contexts this will just be printed.
There are two big benefits: first, if you clobber an existing function,
you have some way of knowing what you've done -- this ticket was
inspired by
sage: t = (1,2,3)
sage: len(t) = 4
which overwrites Python's "len"; and second, something like "sin(x) = 0"
when you mean "sin(x) == 0"
I know that those of us using Sage in educational contexts use symbolic
functions a lot, so I'd appreciate any comments you have on this change.
Ticket URL: http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/14231
Thanks,
Dan
--
--- Dan Drake
----- http://math.pugetsound.edu/~ddrake
-------
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
