Hi Nathann,
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 06:13:52AM -0800, Nathann Cohen wrote:
> Vincent, Travis, Dima : there's a new patch at #13742. It does nothing. It
> just checks input. It adds tests and warnings. And I lost half a day and a
> lunch because of very bad work.
> Feel free to edit the patch as you like. I just want to be sure I can
> trust permutations when I build one. Honestly, for me the only good
> solution is to remove Permutations from Sage and let everything break.
> Then say "if you need it, write it". 5 years of waiting for it to happen
> have not done much good.
Mike Hansen worked like hell back in 2007 to port 30k lines of code
from MuPAD-Combinat to Sage. Of course that was not perfect by far:
you can't achieve such a massive goal and get a clean result in such a
short time, especially when the proper infrastructure is not yet
there. And yes, it often takes more time to refactor code than to
write it from scratch once you have the proper infrastructure. But at
least we had something we could work and do our daily research work
with. Altogether Mike' work was a huge asset in the migration of our
community from MuPAD to Sage, which in the end has already led to
200k+ of code, at lot of which being quite clean.
Yes Permutations, as they are, are quite crappy; we claimed that from
day one. I totally understand your frustration from having been myself
hit hard so often by so many other crappy spots from the original Sage
code. Still, I am grateful to the people who rushed so hard to write
*something* and make Sage happen.
Granted, the refactoring of all this code is frustratingly long. But
there are a *lot* of efforts going on and things are progressing, one
step at a time (thanks everybody for that!). This will eventually get done.
And we should *not* remove that code in the meantime, because, as
crappy as it is, it still serves its purpose in waiting for something
better. If you want to add big fat warnings and some sanity checks,
sure go ahead. But please be kind and unobtrusive to those who wrote
it and those who are working hard to improve it.
Cheers,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthi...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/
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