On Jul 11, 12:22 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 10:04 PM, David Sanders <dpsand...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Jul 10, 10:01 pm, David Sanders <dpsand...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi, > > >> Following up from a couple of my previous posts, I am now wondering > >> how to do symbolic pattern matching for an expression of the following > >> form: > > > Apologies for replying to my own post, but I was wondering if there's > > any documentation I should be reading about this stuff, > > rather than posting every naive question here? > > (Although maybe it's actually useful to post naive questions here!) > > Maybe > > http://sagemath.org/doc/reference/calculus.html
> I'm curious if you had any trouble finding this. It's very easy -- > just click "Documentation", then "Reference" from the sage homepage. Thanks, I had seen this, I think via a Google search, but I did not explore it enough. I guess I was confused by the title 'calculus' instead of 'symbolic manipulation' -- I assumed it was just about differentiation etc. By the way, a minor but important point: the typographical conventions on this page (and many others) are not consistent: some of the titles have every word with an initial capital, whereas some have only the first word and proper names capitalized (my preference). Some have full stops (points) at the end, and others don't (my preference). Personally I have never liked monolithic pages with all possible information, such as http://sagemath.org/doc/reference/sage/symbolic/expression.html It is very difficult to navigate and find what you are looking for. Perhaps the examples could somehow be hidden until you hit a relevant link, at which point they reveal themselves. I suppose the page is probably automatically generated, but it would be more helpful to split it up into "bitesize" pieces. For example, there is a lot of "noise" generated by "obvious" functions like sin, cos etc. Finding the relevant bit about how to do pattern matching is not easy, for example. (Especially if you don't know that what you need is pattern matching!) In general, I find that the documentation is difficult to navigate for a Sage beginner. It is not clear what level each document is at. Even the order of the documents in the Sage standard documentation hides "A tour of Sage", for example, amid more advanced documents. Of course, I realise that writing documentation is difficult! Perhaps it would be useful to have a kind of beginner's page, which lists a suggested order in which to read the different types of documentation. David. > > > William -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
