Craig Citro wrote: > Hi David, > > First, I want to thank you for all the work you've been doing to get > Sage to play nicely on Sun and HP-UX recently. I think that's really > helpful, and in particular, I think some of the comments you make > below are definitely things that will help Mike (or anyone else) make > lcalc better.
Thank you. > That said, I think you're often extremely rude in the way you phrase > things, either on purpose or by accident. For instance: > >> I have been less than impressed with lcalc itself. >> > > Really? Have you used it to compute any zeros of L-functions? Have you > found that it's slow at computing values of L(s,f) for certain modular > forms? Are you unhappy with Mike's code involving the approximate > functional equation? Or are you just unhappy that it's failing to > build on your particular OS/hardware configuration? Mike doesn't seem > to keep a list of "supported platforms" on the lcalc webpage anywhere; > maybe he's part of the vast majority of people who don't use a Solaris > machine as one of his development platforms. I apologise if it came across that way. It was not my intension. I guess I sometimes let my frustration get the better of me. > In short, I think "builds on a variety of hard-to-find Unix systems" > is a metric that's much less important than "performs some interesting > mathematical computation correctly." There is evidence to show a positive correlation between bugs and compiler warnings. I can not say this http://www.springerlink.com/content/317x276846767585/ is the best scientific paper I have ever read, but it shows a statistically significant positive correlation between compiler warnings and the number of changes to a file. Papers it reference show a correlation between bugs and changes to a file. (One of the main weaknesses of the paper is that the reasons for the changes are not known. A file could be changed a lot, simply as new functionality is added.) However, often files get changed a lot, when they have problems, which keep needing to be addressed. Some real bugs I have found in Sage are the result of testing on multiple platforms. I know a bug which only showed up on AIX in http://atlc.sourceforge.net/ was in fact a real bug that could have appeared on any platform. A colleague of mine found out a bug which could have given incorrect results on his linux box, but just never showed up until he tested on Solaris. I personally feel it is inappropriate to cover up warning messages from a compiler or assembler by using options to do this, or by redirecting the outputs of the compilation process to /dev/null. Perhaps my judgment is wrong, but I personally have greater than average confidence in a program like mpfr, where * It is clear the developers take time to test it on multiple platforms * It does not generate many compiler warnings * It has an extensive test suite. But once again, I appologise for any unintended rudeness. dave -- 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 URL: http://www.sagemath.org
