On 06/08/2020 00:47, Nicolas Guarin wrote:
I agree that this would be good for the project but maybe it would be
a good idea to polish the documentation a bit. Some of the pages in
the wiki are somewhat outdated and they are on the first results in a
web search.
Assuming you are talking about the user level documentation, I very
much agree.
If you look up even the simplest function - e.g. Sin[] - in Mathematica,
you get a simple explanation, some examples showing that it can be used
with real numbers, and that it 'knows' about special arguments such as Pi/3.
It shows you the power series about zero and a plot of the function. It
also shows some properties of the function such as Sin[x] = -Sin[-x] etc
etc.
It also shows that Sin can be applied to complex arguments, or even to
matrices, and that it can be applied to a high precision floating point
number to deliver a high precision result.
*That same level of detail is provided for every function - right up to
complicated functions like MeijerG. *Remember that for**functions such
as that, the documentation is even more important because there are
different conventions as to the order,sign, etc of the arguments.*
*
This might appear like overkill, but it means that wherever you start
you will realise a Mathemaica function is far more than just a numerical
function. This is also true for SymPy, but the information is harder to
find. It is also easy to cut/paste from the documentation into your own
code.
Of course, the documentation is massively redundant, but I imagine that
the documentation for each function or operation would not be written
from scratch, but pulled from some kind of database of information.
Obviously the SymPy documentation can't jump to the Mathematica standard
overnight, but maybe a student could put together some sort of framework
from which such documentation of the standard maths functions could be
generated, and start the process off - then others could contribute
information that would fit into the same scheme.
I think that such documentation would make SymPy very much more
user-friendly.
David
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"sympy" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/7d5373f0-d6a5-6361-e656-c15527ca198b%40dbailey.co.uk.
