I cannot replicate this on either sage.math or osx 10.5 intel:
was@sage:~$ sage
----------------------------------------------------------------------
| SAGE Version 2.8.14, Release Date: 2007-11-24 |
| Type notebook() for the GUI, and license() for information. |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
sage: sage: R.<x,y>=MPolynomialRing(QQ,2)
sage: sage: A = matrix([[Integer(1),x], [y,Integer(1)]])
sage: A
[1 x]
[y 1]
sage: A*A
[x*y + 1 2*x]
[ 2*y x*y + 1]
sage: A**2
[x*y + 1 2*x]
[ 2*y x*y + 1]
keyah:~ was$ sage
----------------------------------------------------------------------
| SAGE Version 2.8.14, Release Date: 2007-11-24 |
| Type notebook() for the GUI, and license() for information. |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
sage: sage: R.<x,y>=MPolynomialRing(QQ,2)
sage: sage: A = matrix([[Integer(1),x], [y,Integer(1)]])
sage: A^3
[ 3*x*y + 1 x^2*y + 3*x]
[x*y^2 + 3*y 3*x*y + 1]
sage: A^2
[x*y + 1 2*x]
[ 2*y x*y + 1]
sage: A
[1 x]
[y 1]
sage: A**2
[x*y + 1 2*x]
[ 2*y x*y + 1]
-----
Your subject line suggests maybe this is a solaris-only issue? Is
that the case?
If so, what does "sage -gdb" have to say about it?
William
That's probably because polynomials over ZZ are still unfortunately *not*
implemented using libsingular (which is why they are amusing much
slower in Sage).
> I am currently building 2.8.14 on Linux PPC under
> Linux because I suspect endianess issues and I have valgrind there
> also to investigate.
The problem doesn't occur on OSX powerpc (fermat.math.harvard.edu), which
is maybe an endian data point.
> I am doing "real" work right now, but I should be done with that in
> 8-10 hours ;). Once I am done I will get back to Sage and open ticket
> for all the issues I have uncovered during the port. I have 2.8.14 on
> neron in /tmp. You need to set LD_LIBRRAY_PATH to my 4.2.1-2 gcc to
> play with it.
>
> I also created http://wiki.sagemath.org/solaris to keep track of the
> port.
Excellent.
>
> > William
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
> >
>
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org