On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 07:43:10PM +0100, 'Ralf Hemmecke' via FriCAS - computer
algebra system wrote:
> I don´t care much about the old IndexCard.
>
> I know that it appears in the FriCAS book as an example, but I am not so
> happy that it entered the FriCAS library by this name. As Tim said it was
> meant to be a toy domain. If you now turn it in to a more important domain
> to extract information about the library (which I am in favour of) maybe it
> would be time to think about a better name. I cannot think of something good
> at the moment, but IndesCard is definitely to non-telling for my taste if
> that domain is supposed to provide information
> about other FriCAS internals.
Well, it is not going to be more important. Simply:
- We need a demo as part of FriCAS book. If IndexCard were removed
we would need a replacement.
- For 30+ years IndexCard was the only documented way to get
information about constructors and operations from Spad
programs. Some users may depend on it.
I hope that for retrieving information about constructors and
operations BrowserInformation will be much better. But I not
for deliberatly breaking old code without any warning.
The two reasons above means that I would like to have working
IndexCard. As I wrote I have now a preliminary version that
works on top of BrowserInformation.
I would prefer that people writing new code use BrowserInformation,
but at least for now I do not want to remove IndexCard. But
I want to remove (most of) Boot that was called by IndexCard.
Actually, ATM in my private version of FriCAS IndexCard and a
helper for checking backward compatiblity in BrowserInformation
are the only users of 'libdb.text' and 'comdb.text'. Once I
integrate new IndexCard into my private version I will be
able to remove old database support from it. There are
probably still months to the moment when new code is mature
enough to include it in the trunk, but some pieces (probably
a new IndexCard) may go in earlier.
--
Waldek Hebisch
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