Hi all, we do not seem to understand each other well enough (especially Bill and me). Yet. :-) Let's try an analogy. When compiling C code, you can tell the compiler to "silently skip over warnings"; or to "print out verbose warnings, but to continue"; or to "treat all warnings like errors and stop". Some programmers have "-Wall" enabled right from the start and address every warning as soon as it occurs. Other programmers first want to "see some results" and address the warnings only as a second step, after the bulk of code is written.
Now the coercion/conversion system is not in all aspects comparable to compilig C code. But would you find it helpful to have the possibility to let it act either "as gracefully as possible", or to "print out verbose warnings" (coercions have costs, so if the costs are higher than a specific amount, this could trigger an activity), or to "only do a strict subset of coercions/coversions, and stop otherwise"? Debugging is an essential part of coding, and often the part that takes by far most of the time. Of course it's a matter of style, and of personal taste, how to cope with that situation. But Sage definitely should have the flexibility to allow for different styles and ways of its programmers! Cheers, gsw --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
