2006-01-18-albrecht-email.txt

From Martin Albrecht:

I've added some methods to move between FiniteFields and ntl.GF2E, added 
documentation and examples, added some wrappers around some more NTL 
functions, introduced inheritance, added proper credits, and fixed that 
NoModulus bug. However I didn't touch any other classes yet, so their coerce 
methods don't know anything about ntl.(mat_)GF2(X|E) (yet). But 
ntl.GF2X,ntl.GF2E, and ntl.mat_GF2E now have a method called sage() which 
returns a matching SAGE polynomial, finite field element or matrix 
respectively. Furthermore the constructors accept those classes as input now, 
so you can switch between native SAGE and NTL quite nice. This is however not 
extraordinary fast, the profiler blames the FiniteField and FiniteFieldElement 
classes for this. So I added a dictionary to the sage() method for mat_GF2E 
which speeds up everything quite a bit.