Hi Robin, On 23 Aug., 13:43, robin hankin <hankin.ro...@gmail.com> wrote: > Re automatic_names(): why isn't this the default? > > Now I know it exists, I think I'll probably use it all the time. > > Who uses sage without this option?
I find automatic_names horrible, to say the least! In my opinion, such thing should *never ever* be standard! 1. If you write a little program on the command line and it does something, but simply it doesn't do the right thing or you get strange error messages about missing attributes -- it would be very hard to find out that you forgot to define some object X, so that Sage worked in the wrong assumption that X is a symbolic variable. I strongly prefer to get a clear error message, namely "NameError: Name 'X' is not defined" or so. 2. "Explicit is better than implicit" is a quite common credo. I think it is unsafe to rely on implicit assumptions of the type of an object. 3. I hardly ever work with symbolic variables. So, I really don't see the point why "X" should default to a symbolic variable. 4. My impression is that for quite many people a symbolic variable is the first thing that comes to mind when computing in a CAS - and it takes them a long while until they find that for their particular problem a different class (like a polynomial) works much better. Making a symbolic variable the default, I am afraid that one would support the wrong belief that symbolic variables are good for *everything*. So, it is not so much that programs would break. But debugging would be more difficult, and it would teach the people the wrong lesson, IMHO. And on the other hand, I can't see how life with Sage would be any easier if automatic_names was the standard. Cheers, Simon -- 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
