makelist(): argument size appears restricted to integer -- RFC
Subject: makelist(): argument size appears restricted to integer -- RFC
From: Richard Fateman
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:05:18 -0700
The point is really that you WILL run out of memory after a rather long
delay, if you try to make
a list with 30! elements. As it happens, makelist refuses to do the
computation because it explicitly checks for this situation.
This is unusual for Maxima, whose commands rarely have such "sanity checks".
Robert's proposal, to eliminate the sanity check will not allow Maxima
to compute s(30!). It will only substitute for
the reasonable error message some kind of crash-and-burn error, which
depends on how the underlying Lisp
and operating system deal with out-of-resource issues.
It is possible that the message should replace "non-negative integer"
with some value related to
lisp's most-positive-fixnum which differs from system to system.
That's like to be too large. Better
would be something related to the amount of available memory since a
list of so many
elements is unlikely to work. A much much smaller value, like
1,000,000 might be appropriate.
RJF