Hmm, this is a fairly old function, if I recall correctly, implemented 
relatively early on.    There may be some discussion from where it was 
upgraded at http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/16308 
or http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/16374 (I cannot find the original 
ticket, which surprises me).

So if you are interested in doing this, I would recommend opening a ticket 
and cc:ing the people involved on those tickets.  I feel like your question 
is good, though one could certainly say this is a ValueError like dividing 
by zero.

On Friday, December 5, 2014 9:52:20 AM UTC-5, Rolandb wrote:
>
> Hi, please look at the following example.
>
> sage: print two_squares(3437458237428)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> ...
> ValueError: 3437458237428 is not a sum of 2 squares
>
>
> The ouput is an error message. Thus if I want to test several cases, I 
> have to check each case like:
>
> sage: for k in xrange(10):
> ...       try:
> ...           print two_squares(3437458237428-k), 3437458237428-k
> ...       except:
> ...           pass
> (519651, 1779725) 3437458237426
>
>
> Why is the output not someting like []? 
>
> This seems (to me) more natural, and as Python skips automatically an 
> empty list, programming is easier, lines are shorter and more readable 
> IMHO. It is also faster.
>
> My question is whether there are good reasons to raise a valueError 
> message as output?
>
> Roland
>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"sage-support" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to