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Re: [IMP-dev] Linear algebra



> Most interesting geometry we do is algebraic anyway :-) We could just
> call it math. That is shorter too :-)
> 
> I vote for "math".

I like the name, but unfortunately it would complicate the Python
interface. If someone says "import math" in an IMP Python module they
won't get the standard Python math library - they'll get IMP.math. This
is because Python by default does a relative import before an absolute
import. Fortunately they realized that this is a bad idea, so the
default has changed in Python 3.0 (and can be imported from __future__
in Python 2.6). But obviously we can't require everybody use Python 2.6
or 3.0. It's not impossible to import the standard math module from IMP,
but it is very awkward - see the workaround to import modeller from
IMP.modeller. This additional complication is why I prefer algebra to math.

	Ben
-- 
                      http://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
	- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle