On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 9:04 PM, Donu Arapura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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?
Do you mean on the command line or in the notebook. It would definitely be possible to add something involving numbers in the notebook, and I think it would be good for us to do so -- as long as it is optional since the extra clutter of numbers can be annoying. However, it's unclear to me what output would get what number, since a notebook cell can have lots of outputs... In the command line one there is in fact support for extremely sophisticated command history with numbers -- it is just off by default. Just please write back and clarify what you want. > > 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. Well hopefully you indent your non-Python code anyways :-) > 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? There is a very cool firefox extension that makes it so you can edit *any* textarea in your web browser using emacs. I've never used it, but saw a lot of people using it at the last Sage workshop. Unfortunately I can't remember the name. Maybe somebody else will write and say what it is. > 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. Are you interested in having something based on it included in Sage? > Anyway, my thanks to all for putting this package together. You're welcome. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
