Hi Alasdair,
On 02/02/2008 09:49 PM, Alasdair McAndrew wrote:
Clearly there's more going on here than a lummox like me can follow. I
would possibly argue, though, that in spite of Martin's explanation of
why axiom presents n in factored form in my original expression:
for n in 10..30 repeat output [n, factor(2^n-1)]
it is axiom which is at fault, or at least the expression parsing of
it. Since factor clearly is only applied to the second term in the
list, it shouldn't be applied to the first. And I shouldn't have to
coerce n to type String, Symbol etc to force nonfactoring.
-Alasdair
I am partially on your side. If the above command outputs n in factored
form, that should be more or less considered as a bug. (Though it is not
as Martin explained.)
However, the function output actually requires something of type
OutputForm as input. What you give, is not of that type, it is not even
a list as Martin explained (you wanted a Record anyway). That basically
leaves the interpreter with not enough information from you to do
exactly what you wanted. So the interpreter tries to do its best to
guess what you wanted. You cannot blame the guesser to be wrong if he
has but one choice. And (mathematically seen) the output from the above
command is not wrong. Why should a factored n be different from n?
Why I think that this is a bug is that Axiom should have output nothing
but rather have stopped with an error message that there is no function
[...] which takes an integer and a factored integer as input.
Ralf
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