Hi William, On 22 Nov., 20:44, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 2. IMHO, making libsingular "the perfect Singular interface" would > > include to re-write any Sage code that currently relies on the pexpect > > interface. And this would certainly be a lot of stuff to re-write. > > That's not clear to me. Maybe the full singular command prompt could > be used via a library interface? After all, it is just a C++ program.
What I meant was: There is a difference between "being able to do sth." and "doing sth." I am rather sure that there is much code in Sage and probably third party code as well that uses Singular via pexpect interface. It is one thing to say to the authors of that code: "Meanwhile you can do all this via libsingular" (as much as I understood, it *is* now possible). But it is a completely different thing to make the authors change all their code so that it *does* use libsingular. Hence, if a small change in the singular pexpect interface reduces the overhead by 2/3 then a lot of code would benefit - thus, such small change is worth-while. > The C interface to GAP that I wrote just involves rewriting the > GAP read-eval-print loop (the command line interface) and turning it > into C library calls. I literally just stick some data in where the > read would put it, then tell GAP that it just read something in, so go > evaluate it, etc. I didn't know that there was so much progress - I remember someone mentioning that certain internal aspects of GAP would make the creation of "libgap" difficult. Here is my personal list of pros and contras. Improving the text interfaces by replacing pexpect: - Such radical change (as suggested by Alex) would probably involve much new library code to be written. + AFAIK, text interfaces *will* remain important in Sage + Lots of existing code would benefit. Improving pexpect by reducing the latency time of pseudo terminals: - I doubt that Sage can change it, as this sounds like the job of a system administrator. + Users might be happy if they can find an explanation in the manual how they (or their sys admin) can improve the performance of all existing interface-intensive Sage programs. Reducing the particular overhead of the Singular interface: + The changes I am suggesting are small (doc tests pass, so, I guess I can post a patch tomorrow) + Lots of existing code would benefit. Make libsingular applicable in a broader range of functionality: + (a BIG plus) If something can be done via C API then it is certainly better than a text interface. - Existing code would not benefit. Everything has pros. So, simply one has to decide about one's priority. Mine is to reduce the latency time on my machine and to reduce the singular interface overhead, since that seems to involve both the most impact on my work in cohomology and the least effort. Cheers, Simon -- 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
