Many otherwise intractable computations are possible on large monomial ideals by using monomial ideal algorithms in place of the more general algorithms. I am considering how best to give users of Sage access to these algorithms, as they become available through integration with Frobby. I would like some input and ideas for this, especially since this seems to touch upon a more general Sage design issue.
Monomial ideals are special in that they turn up in many places, large gains are possible, many operations are benefited and the set of monomial ideals are closed under many operations. This is a special case of the broader issue of what to do about special cases that admit substantially better algorithms and data structures. It is not hard to make the monomial ideal case work well once the algorithms and representations are in place. The hard part is doing so without adversely impacting the general case. After all, what about binomial ideals? Square-free ideals? univariate ideals? and so on. The overhead of detecting too many special cases could add up, but not detecting any special cases leads to waste of its own. It is also nicer for things to just work than to ask the user to explicitly request (and thus know about) monomial ideal operations and data structures. How is this kind of thing done in Sage? /Bjarke H. Roune (www.broune.com) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
