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What ended up working: once I have the list of symbols, as in

sage: lst=tuple(f'a{j}' for j in range(5,10))

the free group can be constructed by passing the list via the key word argument names rather than directly:

sage: Frgp=Groups().free(names=lst)

Then:

sage: Frgp([1,2])
a5*a6

tuple() isn't crucial in the definition of lst: list() works just as well.

The point is there's a difference between Groups().free(names=lst) and Groups().free(lst) that I don't quite fully grok at the moment, but the former will do what I want whereas the latter wasn't:

sage: Groups().free([var('a')])
Free group indexed by {a}

sage: Groups().free(names=[var('a')])
Free Group on generators {a}

As you can see, sage reports slightly different output depending on whether the list is passed via names= or directly.

What ended up working: once I have the list of symbols, as in

sage: lst=tuple(f'a{j}' for j in range(5,10))

the free group can be constructed by passing the list via the key word argument names rather than directly:

sage: Frgp=Groups().free(names=lst)

Then:

sage: Frgp([1,2])
a5*a6

tuple() isn't crucial in the definition of lst: list() works just as well.

The point is there's a difference between Groups().free(names=lst) and Groups().free(lst) that I don't quite fully grok at the moment, but the former will do what I want whereas the latter wasn't:

sage: Groups().free([var('a')])
Free group indexed by {a}

sage: Groups().free(names=[var('a')])
Free Group on generators {a}

As you can see, sage reports slightly different output depending on whether the list is passed via names= or directly. directly.