Jakob,
Could we take this discussion onto the support list, please?
I think it's become a bit too abstract to be of general interest for the forum.
If any interesting ideas come up that are of wider interest, we can post a
summary to the forum.
Steve
On 13 Mar 2012, at 15:51, kroeker wrote:
> Dear Alexander,
>
>
> thanks for the link again ! (
> http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=281508.281540 )
>
> Indeed it is not surprising that some features of GAP seem unusual.
>
> Just let us forget GAP for a moment and think in general about one of my
> previous questions:
> What positive or negative implications for a language e.g. 'python'
> would have a silently failed action?
> Is it worthwhile and possible to change the behaviour of the language or
> not?
>
>
>
> Best,
>
>
> Jakob
> ( Яков )
>
>
> P.S. I'm posting some observations which seems unusual to me promptly,
> because as soon as I get adopted to GAP
> I wouldn't even notice. In general some implications of (historically
> grown) functionality are not automatically 'useful' or 'unfavourable',
> e.g. the financial system is evolved over time but I hope you agree that
> it also has some serious problems.
>
>
> Am 10.03.2012 19:30, schrieb Alexander Konovalov:
>> Dear Jakob,
>>
>> On 9 Mar 2012, at 14:52, kroeker wrote:
>> ...
>>
>>>> there is no way to "lock" an operation, [..] it would also cause problems
>>> Let for now assume that it is not necessary to lock operations. Then in my
>>> opinion a user should get at least a warning that locking is not possible
>>> when trying it.
>>> By the way, It shouldn't be possible to lock existing read-only operations,
>>> so it is not obvious to me that locking an operation would cause problems a
>>> priori.
>>> It also seems that other functionality in GAP has similar behaviour which
>>> is unusual from my point of view:
>>> actions fail without a warning, e.g. calling an attribute setter twice with
>>> different values (the second call has no effect)
>> GAP may be regarded as a problem-oriented language designed to be a platform
>> for implementing mathematical (mostly discrete) algorithms, and it has
>> rather unique object-oriented features invented to model mathematical
>> objects: for example, objects that learn during their lifetime and change
>> their type in the process, and dynamic polymorphism (that is, method
>> selection based on current type of all arguments). So it's not surprising
>> that from the beginning some of its features may seem unusual.
>>
>> There is a paper "The GAP 4 type system: organising algebraic algorithms" by
>> Steve Linton and Thomas Breuer in ISSAC'98 proceedings available here:
>>
>> http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=281508.281540
>>
>> which may give more details about the reasoning behind GAP design
>> principles, in addition to the GAP manual.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Alexander
>>
>>
>
>
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