On 03/12/11 02:23 PM, Volker Braun wrote:
On Saturday, March 12, 2011 1:49:40 PM UTC, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
There have been several instances of where doctests have been found to be
wrong,
There have been several instances where stated results in published papers
have been found to be wrong :-)
True. Wolfram Research claims to have found many, numerous one from one
particualr book in one of their library files.
Just because you quote some paper or claim that its obvious to experts in
the field doesn't guarantee that its correct.
True, though if a piece of software, and a published paper agree, then it is
much more likely to be true. You can never be 100% sure.
There is also the issue that
some equation's validity might depend on sign conventions
That should be possible to substantiate though.
choices of branch
points, etc.
Agreed, though it should be possible to state why the expected result is believe
to be true. IMHO, just because Sage gives a result, does not make it true.
While I of course agree that doctests should be as correct as
possible, I don't think that some bureaucratic act where you demand that
people sign of on doctests is going to help much.
I think it would force people to think more clearly about the tests.
If anything, the referee
should use his personal judgement to determine if a doctest is good or not.
From what I can see of tickets, theres a lot of cases where this just does
appear to be happening.
In the long run I feel that it is more productive to have code released to
expose it to a larger audience so that they can use it with examples they
are familiar.
A lot of the stuff in Sage is very specialised, and I would not assume that
people will find bugs too easily.
> Release early, and release often :-)
That very much has its downsides.
If Sage was a word processor, drawing package, or any other of many other sorts
of software, bugs would tend to be found, and if discovered would not cause a
major issue. In contrast, bugs in software like Sage are much more difficult to
find, and are going to be more troublesome to people.
Hence I feel the need to try to push the quality up, rather than the quantity of
code released. To me at least, people being able to substantiate the results of
their doctests is not asking too much.
--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Dave
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