I've read that variables can be subscripted with underscore "_" and superscripted with caret "^". However supescripting doesn't seem to work. I think the caret is seen as a power operator. How to work around this?
Subscript example that works:
var('x,y,z_a')
eqn = x == y*z_a
solve(eqn, z_a)Superscript example that fails:
var('x,y,z^a')
eqn = x == y*z^a
solve(eqn, z^a)Although underscores can be used to define new variables
sage: var('x,y,z_a')
(x, y, z_a)
sage: z_a
z_a"carrots" cannot be used
sage: var('x,y,z^a')
(x, y, z^a)
sage: z^a
Traceback (click to the left of this block for traceback)
...
NameError: name 'z' is not definedThis is because in that last statement, z^a, Sage is looking for a variable called z and trying to exponentiate it with some other variable called a. Note that the symbol ^ is used in Sage for exponentiation. In short, you shouldn't use it to define a new variable.
Asked: 14 years ago
Seen: 1,302 times
Last updated: Jan 19 '11
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Can you let us know where you found that in documentation? That would help us answer this. Caret does indeed mean power, pretty much always in Sage (this is a custom preparsing of Python, where that has a different meaning).