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. SAGE includes GAP, PARI, and Singular, but does not include MAGMA or Octave.

Note that in some cases there is significant overhead associated with each call to one of these systems, since they are each implemented using pseudo-tty's. For example, computing 2+2 thousands of times using the GAP interface will be slower than doing it directly in SAGE. In contrast, the C-library interfaces of Chapter 14 incur less overhead.



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