On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 08/16/10 11:48 PM, Bill Hart wrote: > >>> Cephes is in Sage because it's absolutely critical for the Windows port. >> >> You mean you used it in the Cygwin port? > > I suspect William does. Like you, I don't consider that a native Windows > port. But it might be the closest we get. (We know we differ on this topic. > It's been debated elsewhere, so lets forget that for now).
"Native" is not black and white. By reading the docs at http://www.cygwin.com one can I hope understand what Cygwin is: "a DLL (cygwin1.dll) that acts as an emulation layer providing substantial POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) system call functionality, and a collection of tools, which provide a Linux look and feel". If you were to rewrite everything in Sage that makes POSIX calls by providing your own implementation of exactly those calls (say by making calls into the Win32 API), then you would get something that has little right to be called more "native" than Sage built using Cygwin. It would be equivalently native, but likely be far less modular (and far more buggy and slower) than Sage built on Cygwin. Instead, to get something that is arguably more native, you'll have to rewrite the Sage library in a completely different way, starting with getting rid of all use of fork and pseduotty's (which are used by pexpect). > In contrast, it seems sympow is not used by many people. The fact there are > no bug reports of it not working on the public servers shows how little it > is used. (If someone actually tried to run many of the examples, they will > find they don't work). There is 1 "example" -- the modular degree function -- that is 1000 times more important than the rest. Here's me *using* sympow: sage: E = EllipticCurve('5077a'); E Elliptic Curve defined by y^2 + y = x^3 - 7*x + 6 over Rational Field sage: E.modular_degree() 1984 This modular_degree function is the only function in sympow that people are likely to care about. But it is not just a tiny trivial function that uses only 1% of sympow (it's a major piece of functionality). --William -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
