> > Well, seriously speaking, such drastic changes are needed sometimes, > and they demand a bump in the major version number, e.g. they can > happen in Sage 10.0. > It takes a lot of effort for a newcomer to get that RR and CC are > basically RDF and CDF on steroids, to get the mysteries of AA, etc > etc. >
My perspective is partly coming as someone who has several papers that rely heavily on Sage computations. I've archived the code and data in a permanent fashion, but every backwards incompatible change Sage makes decreases the odds that anyone will be able to easily verify or extend my work five years from now. Certainly, changing the meaning of RealField will break all of it. As you say, such changes are sometimes necessary. However, if Sage can solve the same technical problem by calling the new real number overclass GenuineRealField (or whatever) rather than stealing the name of the current RealField, I am arguing that it is not. With regards to newcomers, I don't think having "RealField" be some abstract base class which is rarely what they need is going to help them, and any scheme for working with reals on a computer is going to be a bit complicated. I will also point out that intermediate users hate-hate-hate having their old notebooks and code no longer work. To any of us, fixing something like this is a simple search and replace after glancing at the traceback to realize what the issue is, but things like this are incredibly frustrating to more occasional users who view tracebacks as incomprehensible. Best, Nathan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/128f0019-1979-4c17-a902-33528232f060n%40googlegroups.com.
