15. Interfaces

An underlying philosophy in the development of SAGE is that it provide a unified interface to the best open source computational software. This is accomplished using either C-library access (see Chapter 14) or a shell interface. This chapter is about the shell interfaces, which currently exist for GAP and Singular.

Note: Each interface requires that the corresponding software is installed on your computer; in particular, neither GAP nor Singular is included with SAGE.

Note that there is significant overhead associated with each call to one of these systems. For example, computing 2+2 thousands of times using the GAP interface will be much slower than doing it directly in SAGE. In contrast, the C-library interfaces of Chapter 14 incur almost no overhead.



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