I agree with Nathan and Frédéric about backward compatibility. The original question was about whether to proceed with creating a GenuineRealField object. I'm in favor of progress in that direction! But I'd also like to see what that object looks like before making a decision about changing the behavior of RR and RealField. David
On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 11:32 AM Nathan Dunfield <nat...@dunfield.info> wrote: > 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. >>> >> >> one needs to maintain the code, one can't just hope it will all magically >> keep working in newer versions (it won't be true even if it was in plain >> Python). >> >> And in this case a fix is trivial. (and you have a chance to check along >> the way that it is still working) >> > > Yes, I am all too well-aware that all code requires some level of > maintenance. The question is how often and how much, and I don't think the > fact that maintenance is inevitable is a good argument for increasing the > amount required unnecessarily. Especially in the context of software used > by mathematical researchers. Enough trivial changes add up to something > nontrivial, and my main point is that for a lot of Sage users, something > like this is not trivial and has the potential to turn mathematicians away > from Sage to one of the "M" tools that are likely more stable (I'm not sure > about that, I of course avoid the M's when at all possible ;-). > > 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/d714fefb-8925-4350-9422-0ebe1fb6ceccn%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/d714fefb-8925-4350-9422-0ebe1fb6ceccn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- 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/CAChs6_%3D%2BtOWRJLDCpJZ3EUzPmRmJtpxjTH1A80-jEXUiMeS2fQ%40mail.gmail.com.
