Subject: "fastfib" in the gf package faster than "fib"
From: Richard Hennessy
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:42:27 -0400
I am trying to dig up the money to go back to school, sorry about any insulting remarks/comments. They were unintended to be insulting, I was trying to be helpful.
Rich
------------Original Message------------
From: "Stavros Macrakis" <macrakis at alum.mit.edu>
To: "Richard Hennessy" <rvh2007 at comcast.net>
Cc: "Maxima List" <maxima at math.utexas.edu>
Date: Sat, Jul-19-2008 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Maxima] "fastfib" in the gf package faster than "fib"
On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 10:59 PM, Richard Hennessy <rvh2007 at comcast.net> wrote:
...This idea works for the assume database. You don't have to maintain more that one copy, just use an assume data structure like a tree instead of an assume "database" structure.
Richard,
Though I appreciate your enthusiasm, frankly I am getting tired of your making naive suggestions for how *other people* could improve the Maxima system. We certainly can use user feedback about areas to improve (and there are lots of such areas), but telling us how easy it would be to do this or that -- in complete ignorance of the existing code base -- is not only unhelpful, but annoying.
This is a volunteer effort, and people contribute in areas they feel are useful or interesting to them. The people here are pretty experienced, and no doubt any of a number of us could spend a few weeks on the assume system or a number of other subsystems and improve them in one way or another. The assume system is weak in many areas, and my priority if I ever did decide to spend some time on it would certainly not be making it thread-safe, but making it mathematically more sophisticated. And by the way, the assume database *is* tree-structured but not thread-safe.
Your hobbyhorse, for whatever reason, is multithreading. Fine. If you want to improve Maxima in that area, then learn enough to contribute instead of lecturing us with trivial observations like "most divide and conquer algorithms would be good to run in separate threads" as though we were slow students in a Computer Science for Poets class.
-s