On Tue, 20 Oct 2020, 15:12 Nathan Dunfield, <nat...@dunfield.info> wrote:
> Well, seriously speaking, such drastic changes are needed sometimes, >> and they demand a bump in the major version number, e.g. they can >> happen in Sage 10.0. >> > It takes a lot of effort for a newcomer to get that RR and CC are >> basically RDF and CDF on steroids, to get the mysteries of AA, etc >> etc. >> > > My perspective is partly coming as someone who has several papers that > rely heavily on Sage computations. I've archived the code and data in a > permanent fashion, but every backwards incompatible change Sage makes > decreases the odds that anyone will be able to easily verify or extend my > work five years from now. > one needs to maintain the code, one can't just hope it will all magically keep working in newer versions (it won't be true even if it was in plain Python). And in this case a fix is trivial. (and you have a chance to check along the way that it is still working) Certainly, changing the versions of RealField will break all of it. As you > say, such changes are sometimes necessary. However, if Sage can solve the > same technical problem by calling the new real number overclass > GenuineRealField (or whatever) rather than stealing the name of the current > RealField, I am arguing that it is not. > > With regards to newcomers, I don't think having "RealField" be some > abstract base class which is rarely what they need is going to help them, > and any scheme for working with reals on a computer is going to be a bit > complicated. I will also point out that intermediate users hate-hate-hate > having their old notebooks and code no longer work. To any of us, fixing > something like this is a simple search and replace after glancing at the > traceback to realize what the issue is, but things like this are incredibly > frustrating to more occasional users who view tracebacks as > incomprehensible. > > Best, > > Nathan > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-devel" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/128f0019-1979-4c17-a902-33528232f060n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/128f0019-1979-4c17-a902-33528232f060n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/CAAWYfq2AWUsk9nkUzhjUQ-msZmqgCLen6sUG9v4XA0A9fZP5TQ%40mail.gmail.com.
