I agree that fastfib is a very minor improvement
and a lot less important than symbolic manipulations.
I thought it would be go to use that instead that "fib"
for different reasons among which the fact the
Fibonacci is one of the things some people try
the first time they use Maxima.
I understand that it might not pay off to do the effort.
Sorry for being *silly*. In my humble silly opinion
casual, unsophisticated and first users should be
considered if we want to increase the user base.
This is called sometimes "marketing".
I understand very well that giving the impression of speed
is definetely less important than substancial improvements
which should be the main goal.
Fabrizio
>> and it is often used by casual users to test how fast a system is.
>
> That's a silly reason to change our code. Should we also optimize the
> calculation of %pi, fpprec=100000, bfloat and 10000! for these
> unsophisticated users?
>
> Frankly, I don't know the applications of large Fibonacci numbers, but
> given that Maxima's strength is *symbolic* calculation, I would be
> much happier to see work on simplifications like fib(n+1)-fib(n) =>
> fib(n-1) and the like than on small speedups for large arguments. Of
> course that is harder....
>
> By the way, the current behavior of fib, where it modifies the global
> variable prevfib, strikes me as really ugly design. What is the
> purpose of this?
>
> -s
>