It seems safer to return a copy and not a reference. The documentation does make it clear that it returns a reference, so it can't really be called a bug. My guess is that there isn't any code out there that exploits that though, so I would vote to not bother with a deprecation warning.
-Marshall Hampton On Tuesday, September 25, 2012 5:28:26 AM UTC-5, Joris Vankerschaver wrote: > > Hi everybody, > > I made two small changes to the Sage interface for cubic spline > interpolation (found in sage/gsl/interpolation.pyx). The first is at > > http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13519 > > and concerns a small bug which prevents splines from being recomputed when > the interpolation points are changed. The patch just adds two lines to the > relevant methods, along with a bunch of doctests, and should be a breeze to > review. > > The other patch is at > > http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13520 > > and simply exposes two methods from GSL for spline integration and > computation of the derivatives. > > One thing that I noticed when working on this patch is that Spline.list > returns a reference to the spline interpolation points (this is actually > noted in the documentation), allowing one again to change the interpolation > points without forcing the spline to be recomputed. This issue was brought > up in #12036 when doctest coverage was addressed, and I've opened a ticket > about this at > > http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13530 > > My question is, can I just change Spline.list() to return a copy of the > list of interpolation points, rather than a reference? Strictly speaking, > this would alter the interface and so a DepreciationWarning of some sort > would be appropriate but I can't imagine that anybody is relying on this > (buggy) behavior. Still, maybe there are other reasons for not making this > change -- please let me know if this is the case. > > With best wishes, > Joris Vankerschaver > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
