On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Roman Pearce <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Feb 1, 12:46 pm, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Roman Pearce <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > I just want to point out the Maple's linear algebra is not quite as
>> > bad as old Linbox times imply. The linalg package has been obsolete
>> > for some time now.
>>
>> It should print a deprecation warning so I would know. Could you suggest
>> that?
>
> I can ask but it was deprecated in Maple 6 so I don't think they'll
> change it now.
What does that mean? I am sitting here using Maple 12, and I type
wst...@sage:/space/wstein/sage-3.3.alpha2$ maple
|\^/| Maple 12 (X86 64 LINUX)
...
> with(linalg);
> A := LinearAlgebra:-RandomMatrix(200);
> det(A);
and it takes 30 seconds.
I know it was deprecated in Maple 6, but isn't it odd that Maple doesn't even
print a warning or something like 6 years later that one is recommended not
to use the det function?
I know this is a Maple question, not a Sage question, but the Sage
project is running into very similar issues of deprecation, etc., and
we're trying to come up with the best policies for how to deal with
them. Obviously the Maple devs must have put a lot of thought into
this, and the solution they came up with is extremely different than
what I would do, so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts. In
summary, my perspective is that the Maple devs decided that to
deprecate a function "foo" means:
(1) leave foo in, i.e., never delete it from maple, [in sage we
would remove foo after 6-12 months],
(2) don't print any warnings at all when people use foo ever [in
sage we would print a deprecation warning]
(3) make sure foo continues to work exactly as it always did before
it was deprecated, in particular, even if there is an identical
function Foo elsewhere in maple that is a million times faster, make
sure that foo continues to be a million times slower than Foo [in
Sage, we would at least make foo call Foo, I think].
So in Sage our plan is to do everything differently. Sage is a young
and immature project compared to Maple. Any thoughts about whether
we're just totally headed down the wrong path with respect to
deprecation. Note that in Sage we have put in various deprecation
warnings, but I think we still haven't ever swept up and deleted old
deprecated code. We just plan to.
-- William
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