Fwd: GUI for SAGE

[William Stein]

- William

(Sent from my iPhone.)

Begin forwarded message:

From: Erik.D.Ja...@Alum.Dartmouth.ORG (Erik D. Jacobson 04)
Date: August 9, 2007 3:12:49 PM PDT
To: wst...@gmail.com
Subject: GUI for SAGE

Hello Prof. Stein,

I'm a high school math teacher and I'm interested in using SAGE in the classroom; I'd like students to write probability simulation programs and I'd like to use SAGE to introduce them to computer programming.  I work with Peter Doyle at Dartmouth College, who has similar goals for using SAGE in an introductory probability course at the college level.

Can you recommend an IDE that supports SAGE?  I like DrPython...but I haven't been able to get it to run my SAGE programs (I'm running SAGE from a virtual machine on my PC).  The Notebook interface lacks colored text and auto-indent--features that can really smooth out the learning curve for a beginner.

Thanks for your time and making this great software available!
Erik Jacobson

[Ted Kosan]

The Sage IDE application I posted a link to earlier would work well
for this type of situation. In fact, teaching beginners how to
program in a high-level language is one of the main reasons I am
putting it together. ( http://206.21.94.60/tmp/sageide_dist.01.zip )

I am also glad to see that I am not alone in thinking that Sage is an
excellent first language to teach to beginners :-)

Ted

[Alec Mihailovs]

From: William Stein

Begin forwarded message:
From: Erik.D.Ja...@Alum.Dartmouth.ORG (Erik D. Jacobson 04)

> Can you recommend an IDE that supports SAGE? I like DrPython...but I

> haven't been able to get it to run my SAGE programs (I'm running SAGE from
> a virtual machine on my PC). The Notebook interface lacks colored text
> and auto-indent--features that can really smooth out the learning curve
> for a beginner.

Personally, I prefer IDLE, but I'm not sure whether Sage can run in it. I am
not ready to pay $200 for developing that feature though.

Alec

[William Stein]

On 8/10/07, Alec Mihailovs <al...@mihailovs.com> wrote:
> > Can you recommend an IDE that supports SAGE? I like DrPython...but I
> > haven't been able to get it to run my SAGE programs (I'm running SAGE from
> > a virtual machine on my PC). The Notebook interface lacks colored text
> > and auto-indent--features that can really smooth out the learning curve
> > for a beginner.
>
> Personally, I prefer IDLE, but I'm not sure whether Sage can run in it.

In Linux you can use IDLE with Sage already as follows (something similar
is probably true on OS X, at least under X windows).

(0) Try
sage: !idle
If you get
"** IDLE can't import Tkinter. Your Python may not be configured for Tk. **"
then read further.

(1) Make sure you've installed the tk devel package. it's called
tk8.4-dev under Ubuntu. (Make sure the tk version is at least 8.3.)

(2) Make sure SAGE's Python has Tk support included. It will
if you built Python yourself and already had tk8.0-dev installed.
Otherwise, you'll have to rebuild the Python interpreter included in SAGE:
sage -i sage -f python-2.5.1.p3
Here I got the version number as the latest Python package
listed at SAGE_ROOT/spkg/installed. One could also look at
http://sagemath.org/packages/standard/

(3) To start IDLE, do
sage: !idle

I've attached a screenshot to this email.

-- William