Re: [sage-devel] Sage & Pari

[Karim Belabas <Karim.Belabas@math.u-bordeaux1.fr>]

* Jeroen Demeyer [2011-07-25 17:24]:
> On 2011-07-25 15:40, John Cremona wrote:
> > A second point Karim made is that he would like to see more more cases
> > (currently: 0)  in which a deficiency in a part of Pari used by Sage
> > -- for example, some number field functionality -- was fixed by
> > contributions to Pari itself, rather than by adding the extra
> > functionality within the Sage library.
> 
> There are certainly a lot of PARI bugs which were discovered through
> Sage and then patched in PARI.

In this particular argument, I was thinking rather of contributing new
features, API or documentation improvements or even help with long term
planning. (As would be useful for Sage development, of course.)

Reporting bugs is fine, and we will try to fix them, but they take a
disproportionate amount of our time. We already have lots of
regular users reporting lots of (usually simple) bugs.

We badly need feedback at a higher level, from developpers or would-be
developpers, regarding the features they think are lacking in Pari, and
are preventing them from developping in Pari the way they would like to.

Due to various historical reasons, many features will never be available
in Pari, and we understand that most would-be developers will rather
develop for some other system. We'd like to try and make the life of
the others easier. But we need to be aware of what they need...

> Regarding PARI contributions: I simply think that Sage is much more
> developer-friendly than PARI.  One, because programming in Sage is much
> easier than in PARI and second, because there is a "Sage community" but
> no "PARI community".   You cannot really blaim PARI for using C as a
> programming language (it is also because of historical reasons), but I
> think there can be some blaim for being such a closed community of
> essentially 2 developers.

(Make that "4 developers", currently.)

The community is not closed, we are quite open to contributions and
suggestions. It sometimes takes a lot of time, yes, I can take the blame
for that...

We will start to organize "PARI days" on a regular basis, say once a year
now that we have money for it. To try and build up a small community of
developpers; the PARI workshop at IHP (2004) is already 7 years behind us :-(

> There isn't even a working PARI mailing list... which I think is
> really a pity.

EZMLM and its qsecretary are gone, so I don't think this is accurate. See

  http://pari.math.u-bordeaux1.fr/lists-index.html

in case you'd like to re-subscribe.

Cheers,

    K.B.
--
Karim Belabas, IMB (UMR 5251)  Tel: (+33) (0)5 40 00 26 17
Universite Bordeaux 1          Fax: (+33) (0)5 40 00 69 50
351, cours de la Liberation    http://www.math.u-bordeaux1.fr/~belabas/
F-33405 Talence (France)       http://pari.math.u-bordeaux1.fr/  [PARI/GP]
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