Using with SageMath

[darkl]

I am using VSCode with SageMath Jupyter notebooks. I followed these instructions for that. It works well, but I was wondering if I could use Pylance for intellisense and autocomplete? For instance, I would like to see documentation for the methods of the SageMath objects. Currently I don't.

Thanks for your help
Elad

[savannahostrowski]

Hey @darkl! Could you provide a little more information about your dev environment (e.g. Pylance version, VSCode version etc)? This will help us debug. Additionally, could you check if this reproduces on the latest version, 2020.7.0?

[darkl]

Pylance version: v2020.7.0
VSCode Python extension version: v2020.6.91350
VSCode version: 1.46.1 (system setup)
Windows 10 Version 1909 (OS Build 18363.900)
SageMath info:
SageMath version 9.0, Release Date: 2020-01-01, Using Python 3.7.3

It doesn't seem to generate intellisense/documentation with the latest version.

Thanks!

[jakebailey]

From that guide, this looks to be a completely different notebook/language type than Python, no? It relies on patching the Python extension to treat the Sage stuff as python, when it actually isn't. I'm not sure that this is a supported scenario, as the Python extension's notebook support is currently only suited for Python code (and contains many workarounds to get rich features from regular Python code editing into the notebook view).

Perhaps @microsoft/datascience-vsc-team may be more able to define what's expected here.

[darkl]

I wouldn't say it's a completely different language, SageMath is an extension of Python, and any code written in Python in theory should run of Sage. Since the source code of SageMath is written in Python, I did expect to be able to get intellisense/documentation for methods. I would remark that listing of the methods works well after initializing an object of some type (much better than the web browser interface), but the trouble is that no parameters intellisense/documentation is provided.

[jakebailey]

I wouldn't say it's a completely different language, SageMath is an extension of Python, and any code written in Python in theory should run of Sage.

Fair enough, thanks for the correction.

but the trouble is that no parameters intellisense/documentation is provided.

I think you may just have the tooltip hidden. If you hover over the selected completion line, does a ">" appear where you can expand the tooltip to get more info? VS Code unfortunately hides this info by default.

[jakebailey]

For example:

Can be expanded to:

By clicking the ">" or hitting Ctrl+Space.

[joyceerhl]

the Python extension's notebook support is currently only suited for Python code

Dev from microsoft/datascience-vsc-team here, just wanted to add for context that we are working on support for multiple language kernels in our notebook experience, tracked in microsoft/vscode-python#12111 and https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/issues/11919 :)

[darkl]

For example:

By clicking the ">" or hitting Ctrl+Space.

Unfortunately, there is no ">" and Ctrl+Space just shows all the variables/functions available in the scope.

[jakebailey]

The key thing here is that SageMath is a superset of Python. If you look at the original example, the code in its entirety is:

finiteField = GF(25)
finiteField.

But where did GF come from? It's a new builtin function that Sage offers that doesn't exist in Python. But Pylance only knows about Python, not Sage. This code wouldn't run as-is in Python without something to bring GF into scope.

The reason this appears to work at all is because the notebook code calls both the kernel and Pylance to get completions, then merges their info together. The kernel has the live data, and because you've patched Sage in as the kernel, it knows how to answer the question and gets a result. Pylance answers "IDK", and the frontend just uses what the kernel answered, which currently isn't as rich as what the language server offers for normal Python code. Perhaps this could change in general (the notebook code recently changed to allow some of the live data to come through), but that's a different discussion about how to handle non-Python languages.

Python code runs in Sage, but that doesn't imply the Sage can be read as Python, and Pylance only knows about Python.