On May 5, 2007, at 14:20 , William Stein wrote:
> On 5/5/07, Michel <michel.vandenbergh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]
> This inconsistency isn't a bug, since it's clearly documented in the
> maxima interface. However it is confusing. I should either change the
> maxima indexing to be 1-based again (like Maxima's native indexing),
> or change the other interfaces (to MAGMA, PARI, Mathematica) to
> all be 0-based. I'll wait for comments from people reading this
> before
> deciding.
>
> sage: magma([5,7])[1] # good or bad?
> 5
Good.
It really depends on whether we (or maybe better: our target
audience) are mathematicians or computer scientists. If the former,
we should tend to make indices 1-based; otherwise, 0-based. My
recent experience is that I have to "fix" a lot of (ahem) typos in my
code for just this reason (I'm thinking 1-based).
Of course, it doesn't pay to "fix" python, and this can lead to
problems when "mixing metaphors", as above. No really good answer,
it seems to me.
Justin
--
They said it couldn't be done, but sometimes it
doesn't work out that way.
- Casey Stengel
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