On 17 Aug, 21:09, Peter Jeremy <peterjer...@acm.org> wrote: > On 2010-Aug-16 14:32:14 -0700, Bill Hart <goodwillh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > >I'm also really wondering why cephes is in Sage. Unless there are two > >packages with the same name, it was last updated circa 1994 and uses > >non-portable long doubles. We've booted packages from Sage for much > >less felonious offences. > > cephes is used to provide C99 math functions for systems that do not > provide complete C99 math functionality natively. Currently, this > is cygwin and FreeBSD, though other proprietary Unix systems may also > need it. >
I see. > Whilst it was _written_ in the early 90's, it has been updated since > then, with patches dated up to around 2005. In any case, age of code > is not inherently an indication of bugginess. Assuming code has no > known bugs and achieves its stated functionality, there is no need to > touch it (though I don't know this is true of cephes). > The issue is not whether it has no known bugs, but who will maintain it when bugs are found. > As for "long doubles" - whilst they may be non-portable, AFAIK, they > are part of C99. They are also extensively used in Sage. If you > want to get rid of long doubles completely, feel free. It's being > unreasonable to have long doubles in Sage and then remove code that > is needed to support them. > They are part of the C99 standard. However, unlike IEEE doubles, they are not standardised. This makes them totally worthless for mathematical computations where one wants to rely on any properties of the result. They should not be used in Sage. They are essentially a hack. If someone wrote a long doubles library which was standardised across all systems supported by Sage and used software emulation on platforms where native hardware support is not provided (pretty much all of them), then I would support the inclusion of that in Sage. Bill. > On 2010-Aug-16 16:24:24 -0700, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >I would rather have a windows port than not having a Windows port. > >Problems may be created as a result. But since Cephes is only used > >on Windows, the problems will be less than the current problem which > >is that Sage doesn't work at all on Windows. > > Seehttp://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9543 > Is there no longer any interest in a FreeBSD port? > > -- > Peter Jeremy > > application_pgp-signature_part > < 1KViewDownload -- 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
