rjf wrote:
> In that report, William Stein says,
> "A large amount of the symbolic functionality that uses Maxima has
> issues like this, but unfortunately there is basically nothing we can
> do about it, except continue with projects to rewrite the parts of
> Sage that call Maxima so that they don't call Maxima."
> 
> Which is clearly untrue.  Here is one obvious alternative:  You or
> someone else, can look at the (open source) Maxima code and try to fix
> it.
> 

Could you be persuaded to look at the Maxima code, since you have a 
background in this area? As you are well aware, I don't.

> As for Bondarenko submitting 100 bugs to WRI and WRI accepting 90 of
> them ... I would expect that they were 90 instances of one or a few
> bugs.

He seems to find enough genuine ones I think.

> As for working around it, Bondarenko is not interested in work-
> arounds. He is not interested in the result of this computation, which
> was probably artificially generated by randomly clumping together
> stuff. He is interested in finding bugs.

Vladimir Bondarenko is no doubt more interested in finding bugs with 
CAS's than actually using the tools. He is no doubt more interested in 
finding bugs in commercial tools that open-source ones, as he is more 
likely to generate income from that.

But the Sage project would be unwise to ignore things he found, whatever 
his reasons for finding them might have been.

I'm sure companies like Wolfram Research employ people to just find 
bugs, reporting them so others can fix them. Using random data sounds a 
logical way to me - I've used that technique for testing code I've 
written - totally unrelated to CAS's I would add.

I have little interest in how CASs work myself. I just want to use them 
as a tool. Since Sage does not run on Solaris properly, I'd like to see 
that change.

I don't agree with how Vladimir reports his bugs. I've had my 
'differences' with him over the years, but he is no idiot and if he has 
found a bug, it should be fixed if possible.

Dave.


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