#17898: Removal of wrong stopgap
-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: aschilling | Owner:
Type: defect | Status: positive_review
Priority: major | Milestone: sage-6.6
Component: combinatorics | Resolution:
Keywords: stopgap, | Merged in:
partitions | Reviewers: Travis Scrimshaw,
Authors: Travis Scrimshaw, | Anne Schilling
Anne Schilling | Work issues:
Report Upstream: N/A | Commit:
Branch: | 2f7a90d8419ca8d2202b3cb31290e58194f666e3
public/combinat/fix_bad_stopgap-17898| Stopgaps:
Dependencies: |
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Comment (by ncohen):
Anne, Travis,
Isn't it more important to make sure that our software returns correct
results ?
I agree that this warning can be worrying to the users, but I would be
even more worried to learn that we start hiding stopgap to pretend that
everything is fine when it is not.
We have in Sage a stopgap for a function that does return wrong results,
and this is healthy. I do not understand why you keep saying that "there
are no bugs" either. This example comes from the documentation, and is a
bug to me:
{{{
sage: list(IntegerListsLex(6, max_part=3, max_slope=-1))
[[3, 3], [3, 2, 1]]
}}}
Hiding a warning to protect our "public image" is no responsible way of
doing things. And we, developers, need to know when we call a buggy
functions, as much as the other users do.
You would not try to hide an error in a fundamental lemma you need in a
scientific paper, would you? This is how we mathematicians/computer
scientists should be doing our job: with absolute respect for correction
and accuracy.
Now, I understand that you may not like to see such a warning raised by
your code, and you have in front of you many possibilities to change that:
- Include the name of the faulty function is the stopgap warning: "The
function IntegerListsLex is knows to return wrong result [...]". It would
actually be a nice improvement to stopgap in general.
- Not show the warning for inputs that have been checked to be correct
- Rewrite a small function to enumerate only the objects that you need,
i.e. without having to handle all the parameters at once.
Please. Let us try to find a way to fix this responsibly, and stop playing
this "positive review/needs work" game.
Nathann
--
Ticket URL: <http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/17898#comment:28>
Sage <http://www.sagemath.org>
Sage: Creating a Viable Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica,
and MATLAB
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