I'd like to discuss whether limiting the size of exponents of variables in Sage is a good way to go, and whether it is necessary to report an error when breaking those limits. In the default polynomial ring using Singular, Sage currently reports an exponent overflow error when presented with a variable raised to an exponent larger than 2^15. There seems to have been no discussion on sage-devel on whether this is acceptable. Am I the only one who thinks that such a limitation is a problem? I wonder if Magma, Maple and Mathematica have such a limitation.
There is the further issue on whether it is necessary to report an error on overflow, which it seems is currently only done some of the time: I tried to see if I could break Grobner bases in Sage due to these limitations in Singular, and this resulted in these two trac tickets, where the first is a silently wrong Grobner basis (I haven't verified that this is indeed due to Singular): http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6472 http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6473 Now those two examples are specifically constructed to trigger this kind of thing, but computations of actually interesting Grobner bases using Buchberger's Algorithm can reach high degrees even when both the input and output have low degree. The limitations in Singular are spelled out at http://www.singular.uni-kl.de/Manual/latest/sing_343.htm#SEC384 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
