At the risk of providing some information about what is probably going on, let me suggest the following.
1. The expand() command in Maxima is almost always the wrong thing to do if the argument is a polynomial. ratexpand() or ratsimp() or rat() will be much faster. I suspect that in your timings of Maxima, the major contributor may be expand. 2. This is not a good test of polynomial factoring, because it does uses only a trivial part of the algorithm, and that is the square-free factoring part, that consists of computing P' a derivative of P and a gcd(P,P'). Mostly you are testing the gcd program, but only the case of the gcd program for gcd(a,b) where, almost all the time, a divides b. So you are not even testing the gcd program, you are testing polynomial division with remainder. Now if that is what you want to test, fine. If you want to test polynomial factoring, there is a substantial literature on how to choose polynomials that are difficult to factor. Especially large degree is not really necessary. While it is only a speculation on my part, I think what you may also be timing is the conversion of relatively large character strings, at least in some cases. I hope you can straighten this out before you present your results at your conference. RJF --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
