On Nov 18, 9:01 am, Simon King <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Dear William,
>
> On Nov 18, 5:26 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Which is one more reason to consider it a mis-feature. I had no
> > clue when I wrote that code whether # optional or putting those three
> > words in would turn out to be the way to go. In retrospect, # optional is,
> > since generally speaking, "explicit is better than implicit".
>
> Here I disagree, for the following reason.
There has been talk about making "#optional" more clever, i.e. one
would feed it a list of optional components and then -optional would
only test for those components that are installed. One could still
have a global switch to do what you want, but let it be less random
than some words in the text.
> I have many examples for a class that depends on SmallGroups library
> being installed.
> With the "requires optional package" feature, I can turn off all
> examples at once.
>
> Am I right that it'd be needed to put "# optional" after each input
> line? Then, I think the "requires optional package" really is a
> feature, not a misfeature.
>
> Similar things hold with the "# long time" feature: It switches off
> one input line (unless -long is used), but it does not switch off the
> lines that depend on it.
> How painful if you have many lines of code that only take short time
> but have to be commented # long time since they depend on one long
> command from the very beginning of the example!
>
> I think it would be nice to have a way to define a whole block of code
> as "being long". E.g.
> sage: One_long_command # starting long example
> sage: many
> sage: short
> sage: commands # ending long example
> sage: continuing
> sage: independent
> sage: computations
>
> so that the first four lines (but not the last three) require sage -t -
> long
>
> Yours
> Simon
Cheers,
Michael
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