I apologize in advance for my somewhat rambling post. I don't have  
any really urgent
questions; just a few small ones, along with some comments. I'm an  
algebraic
geometer, so I use Macaulay 2 for certain things, but often I prefer  
Maple
which has a lot more flexibility. Although I  have free access  to  
Maple through
my University, I have never been entirely comfortable with  this...  
but I suppose
it's not necessary to preach to the choir.  I'd heard some rumours  
about Sage,
and  I recently downloaded it to my  Mac (G5, macosx 10.4). I have  
been playing
with it for a couple of days,  and I am pretty impressed.  However...

  In Maple I find it convenient to use  "%" to refer to the output on  
the  previous line.
Is there a way to do this in Sage? If not, would this or a scheme  
using line numbers,
be a useful feature to add?

  As a more serious exercise, I tried writing a script in Sage. Since
I'm pretty new to Python, I have to admit that I was a bit taken  
aback that
indentation was part of the language, but it's not a big deal.  
Anyway,  I
found that I could manage by typing things into  emacs (actually  
aquamacs)
and pasting the formatted code into the notebook, since I like to  
debug one
function at a time. This seems a bit clumsy however. What to other  
people do?
Surely, it  must be possible to have emacs communicate directly with  
sage?

Incidentally, the script in question  computes Betti numbers for  
moduli spaces
of vector bundles using standard formulas. I'm happy to say that it  
seems to
be working correctly under Sage. I've checked it against values  
generated by
my original Maple script and published values for small rank and genus.

Anyway, my thanks to all for putting  this package together.

- Donu Arapura




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