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 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.