On Friday, April 24, 2015 at 6:37:45 AM UTC-7, Peter Mueller wrote: > One of my favorite examples is ``numerical approximation'' of permutation > group elements ... > > sage: x = SymmetricGroup(5).random_element() > sage: 'numerical_approx' in dir(x) > True > > ... and this is not the only method offered for x which doesn't make any > sense at all. > I think it mainly illustrates that one shouldn't expect all items in dir(x) to be useful methods on your particular object x. This is generally the case in python. The "numerical_approx" method comes from sage.structure.element and it is a fairly sensible approach: try to find a numerical approximation to an element by trying to coerce it into a field (actually, first try an dispatch via x._numerical_approx). To have that functionality, sage.structure.element is not a bad place to implement it and consequently, symmetric group elements will inherit it and the method will fail on them.
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