On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 5:27 PM, John Cremona <john.crem...@gmail.com> wrote: > However sometimes I have felt that "algorithm" did not quite capture > the distinction being made for some function. I have written > functions in Sage which have an algorithm parameter which can be > either "pari" or "sage", where the underlying algorithm is in fact the > same, but we are choosing to use one implementation of it instead of > another. I could try arguing for the use of "implementation" as the > name of the parameter... but "algorithm" will do fine.
+1 on both "implementation" seems a bit better, but "algorithm" is ok. Sometimes I wish there was a standard/uniform way to code the frontend for a multiple-implementation function in such a way that (a) introspection knows about it, so e.g. "function??" shows the actual code for the default implementation, and it's also easy to get the actual code for the other implementations. (b) doctesting can be improved based on that (e.g. doctests are run with algorithm="all", without need to repeat). (c) a generic tuning/benchmaketing framework could be implemented feeding back the tuning to the frontend. (d) in case there is a better implementation which depends on optional packages or tables, it becomes default when the required optional package is installed. Just my 2 cents.. Gonzalo --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
