Re: Another computer algebra system : smib

Richard Fateman wrote:


It is probably more useful as a teaching aid,
as its easier to understand a couple of
thousand lines of code than it is a few
million lines of code.

Easier to understand, easier to maintain.


A piper cub airplane is easier to understand and easier to maintain than a Boeing 747. Which would you rather use? (for what purpose...)

If you want to look at a teaching aid, there are several books that
discuss the writing of computer algebraic manipulation programs,.. differentiation, simplification, integration, parsers,
displays, etc.

Reading the source code of a small system might be useful AFTER
looking at material that is explicitly tutorial in nature. But
that kind of assumes that smib is an exemplar of
good practice, and not just some hack job. I have no knowledge
of smib except the previous messages in this thread.

I do not know if you ever see it, but there was a very good book written by Andrew Tanenbau about Unix, which contained the full source code of a small unix operating system called Minix (mini Unix). I personally had think Tanenbau's license been less restrictive, minix would have 'taken off', and linux would not have existed.

I think a similar book about a CAS would be useful as a teaching aid. (Not that personally I have much interest in the internal workings of a CAS.)

I have the same reservations about recommending the reading of source code of Sage as a teaching aid. I have not read any Sage python source code.

I don't agree. There are several examples of bad programming style, which would probably be good stuff for a computer science course!

I don't have the technical expertese to say how useful Sage's source code is for learning about computer algebra systems.

I would say to the original poster, the best way to make your code more robust is to test it on other systems. Clearly someone has pointed out it mis-behaves on his machine. I have offered you access to Sun hardware running Solaris if you want to test on Solaris.

From my own personal experience, testing code on multiple platforms shows up lots of bugs. Sage builds on Solaris with gcc, but not the Sun compiler. In attempting to build Sage with Sun's compiler, I have uncovered all sorts of problems, which do not show up with gcc. A partial list is here.

http://sagetrac.org/sage_trac/ticket/7056


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