Since the one of the arguments for the decreasing order seems to just be textual representation - do we want to tweak the repr to something like

Polynomial(lambda x: 2*x**3 + 3*x**2 + x + 0)

(And add a constructor that calls the lambda with Polynomial(1))

Eric

On Sat, 30 Jun 2018 at 14:30 Eric Wieser <wieser.eric+numpy@gmail.com> wrote:

“the intuitive way” is the decreasing powers.

An argument against this is that accessing the ith power of x is spelt:

x.coeffs[i] for increasing powers

x.coeffs[-i-1] for decreasing powers

The former is far more natural than the latter, and avoids a potential off-by-one error

If I ask someone to write down the coefficients of a polynomial I don’t think anyone would start from c[2]

You wouldn’t? I’d expect to see

$f(x) = a_3x^3 + a_2x^2 + a_1x + a_0$

rather than

$f(x) = a_0x^3 + a_1x^2 + a_2x + a_3$

Sure, I’d write it starting with the highest power, but I’d still number my coefficients to match the powers.

Eric