On Jan 23, 2009, at 11:37 AM, Carl Witty wrote: > It's clear that the present situation is not ideal. I doubt if pynac > symbolics will fix all your problems (for instance, if your car makes > a funny noise whenever you go over 50mph, I don't think pynac > symbolics will help). Since I don't know what all your problems are, > let me focus on occasionally very slow symbolic computations in Sage. > > I can see a few possible solutions here: > > 1) try to educate users to avoid the symbolics subsystem (use > polynomial rings, etc., instead) > > 2) make symbolic computations avoid maxima more (switch to pynac, or > fix bugs in calculus.py, if indeed there's a bug there)
+1. This seems like the ideal solution. > 3) I'm (still!) rewriting fast_float; one of the goals of the eventual > rewrite is to have a mode that uses Sage objects instead of floating- > point numbers (of course, this is much, much slower than the floating- > point mode, but it's still quite a bit faster than calling out to > maxima). If I ever finish the rewrite, then perhaps symbolic > functions could use this mode automatically. How is this going? I hadn't heard any more on it, so I wondered if you were still working on it. > 4) try to educate users more about _fast_float_ (better documentation, > etc.) I think ideally most users shouldn't have to be exposed to _fast_float_ (or the more general version mentioned above), but we're clearly not there yet. Library users should know about it though. - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
