Two suggestions:

["Prof. J. E. Cremona" <John.Cremona@nottingham.ac.uk>]

(1) As Bill has reported, although ellsearch() allows one to take from
the database all elliptic curves with a given conductor, it is
inefficient to do this in a loop, say from N=N1 to N=N2, since each call
to ellsearch() causes the entire relevant database file to be read in.

I suggest adding a function of the form

forell(E,N1,N2, seq ) which would execute seq for all elliptic curves E
in the database with N1 <= cond(E) <= N2;  which would only read each
file once.

That's my first wish-list suggestion (of 2006).

(2) The elliptic curve databes holds each curve's id as a string, for
example "20160cy2".  It would be convenient to be able to simply split
this into 3 components, for example [20160,"cy",2].  With Bill's help I
have written a gp function to do this:

{
code2seq(code)=local(v,N=0,num=0,i=1,i1,class);
v=Vecsmall(code);
while(v[i]<58,N=10*N+v[i]-48;i++);
i1=i;
while(v[i]>57,i++);
class=Strchr(vector(i-i1,j,v[i1+j-1]));
while(i<=length(v),num=10*num+v[i]-48;i++);
[N,class,num]
}

But this direct manipulation of the vector of ASCII codes is rather
awkward.   Surely there would be other places in which some string
manipulation would be helpful?  Can we add this to the wish-list please?

Happy New Year to all,

John

-- 
 Prof. J. E. Cremona             |
 University of Nottingham        | Tel.:  +44-115-9514920
 School of Mathematical Sciences | Fax:   +44-115-9514951
 University Park                 | Email: John.Cremona@nottingham.ac.uk
 Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK          |


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