Currently polymake is not well supported at all within Sage. There are a few distinct reasons for that. If someone is interested in Sage and polytopes, I recommend looking at geometry/polyhedra.py. The main object right now is the Polyhedron class which can do quite a few basic operations, mostly by using cddlib. You can also look at some built-in Polyhedron examples through the polytopes - just type
polytopes. and press Tab to see what is currently available. I have some more planned for the near future. If the polyhedra.py code cannot do what your friend wants, please encourage him or her to post here or sage-devel and tell us what he or she needs. I am very interested in feedback. It would be nicer to not duplicate the effort of polymake, but there are a number of reasons for working on our own code. 1) Polymake takes a long time to compile, which is something of a problem for making it a standard package. 2) Its architecture makes it somewhat difficult to support for a wide range of platforms - at least that is the impression I have gotten, I could be wrong. 3) The most serious reason is that its graphics rely on JavaView, which is non-free software that we cannot support or include at all. That is a real deal-breaker for me. 4) The scripting side is focused on perl rather than python. Not too serious, but it discourages me personally at least, and probably some other sage developers as well. 5) It is not too hard to get much of the basic functionality by using the same libraries as polymake - primarily cddlib (already standard) and lrs (an optional package currently). Again, I am very interested in hearing more about what people actually want to compute. Cheers, Marshall Hampton On Feb 12, 11:20 pm, Luiz Felipe Martins <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a colleague that wants to use polymake in Sage. (I'm not a > geometry person, but I am trying to help him). > > So, I found out in the documentation (chapter 36) that there is a Sage > interface. He wanted to import the polymake output to Sage, but I > could not help him with that. I tried the stuff in section 36.3 but > didn't have much success importing/using the module. (I can run the > examples in section 36.1, though). > > He tells me that he will be wanting to write a bunch of scripts, so I > said that it may well be worth his time to learn a bit of Python and > do it in Sage (instead of using shell scripting, which was my/his > initial idea) (He also doesn't have much experience in shell > scripting, so it is *definitely* better to learn Python, IMHO.) > > His main question is that he will be able to do everything he does in > polymake through Sage. So, I perhaps can find someone that has done > geometry in Sage to put in touch with him? > > -- > "The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and > not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive > happiness, and relations of friendship or affection." > -Bertrand Russell > > L. Felipe Martins > Department of Mathematics > Cleveland State University > [email protected] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
