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 9) or a shell interface. This chapter is
about the shell interfaces, which currently exist for GAP
and
Singular
.
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 9 incur almost no overhead.