#9650: Adding support for differential forms
-----------------------------------------------------------+----------------
Reporter: jvkersch | Owner:
burcin
Type: enhancement | Status:
needs_work
Priority: major | Milestone:
sage-4.5.3
Component: symbolics | Keywords:
forms, functions, symbolics
Author: Joris Vankerschaver | Upstream: N/A
Reviewer: Niles Johnson | Merged:
Work_issues: __init__.py, documentation warnings, gens() |
-----------------------------------------------------------+----------------
Comment(by jason):
Replying to [comment:17 jvkersch]:
> Hi Niles and Mitesh,
>
> Thank you for your instructive comments. Niles, thanks also for
agreeing to review my patch! The suggestion to include this functionality
to the reference manual was especially helpful -- it makes everything so
much clearer to see the documentation in nice, crisp HTML form.
>
> I implemented the changes you suggested (adding to the reference manual,
adding authors, making `gens()` return a tuple), but I have a few
questions/comments that are more of a technical nature, revealing
simultaneously my mercurial ineptitude:
>
> 1. I made a mess of the upload section -- could someone with admin
privileges delete all but the most recent attachment?
Done.
>
> 2. Try as I might, I could not produce a patch which creates the file
`__init__.py`. I added that file to my sage tree as per the
documentation, instructed hg to add it, confirmed with `hg status` that it
was listed as added, but when I look at `hg diff` that file is nowhere to
be found. The other files are created/modified as expected. The patch
also does not create `__init__.py`, as you experienced. Are these init
files somehow special as far as hg is concerned?
>
A peculiarity of Mercurial is that it can't check in empty files. So
usually we'll add either a space, or a comment like:
{{{
# This comment is here so the file is non-empty (so Mercurial will check
it in).
}}}
or something like that.
> 3. I called the package `tensor` rather than anything more specific in
order to accommodate future additions: it would be good to have support
for generic tensors (not just differential forms) and common operations on
them (e.g. covariant derivations), so that we could for instance do
symbolic Riemannian geometry. However, if you think we should stick to a
more specific name for now, then that's fine with me too.
Personally, I'm okay with "tensor", since "differential_forms" would be
equally confusing to my calc 3 students, so (a) there will be a learning
curve anyway, and (b) most functions students would use are probably going
to be imported into the top-level namespace anyway.
--
Ticket URL: <http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9650#comment:18>
Sage <http://www.sagemath.org>
Sage: Creating a Viable Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica,
and MATLAB
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"sage-trac" group.
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-trac?hl=en.
