On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Michael Orlitzky <[email protected]> wrote: > On 04/05/2016 01:03 PM, William Stein wrote: >> >> I think we should change is_prime for rational numbers, since people >> get confused by this so much. >> >> How? Pretty much any change at all would be better than the current >> situation. Options I can think of: >> >> - make is_prime([rational]) raise an error and tell the user what to do >> - look at what is_prime([rational]) does in Pari, Mathematica, etc., >> and do the same thing >> - make is_prime([rational]) return is_prime(ZZ([rational])) -- this >> would be a change that would potentially silently break some code, but >> is what many people expect. >> > > Why not have two? The problem is that everyone knows what is_prime() is > supposed to do -- it's supposed to tell you if a number is prime. Except > it doesn't always do that, it does some abstract mumbo jumbo whenever > you don't have an integer (even if you do "have an integer"). > > We could leave is_prime() for humans, and have is_prime_in_ring() for > people who know what that means.
That would be much better than the current situation. -- William -- William (http://wstein.org) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-support" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-support. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
