Bug report ID:2960403 "spurious floats in asksign"

On 3/8/10 1:05 PM, Dieter Kaiser wrote:
> As reported on sourceforge.net it seems that the revision 1.18 of
> db.lisp has introduced the problem of the bug report ID:2960403
> "spurious floats in asksign". The changes of revision 1.18 have not
> intended to change anything, but they do. I have no idea what it is the
> problem.
>   
Rev 1.18 says it made things easier to read.   Changing some special
variables to use the *foo* convention is nice, but otherwise it doesn't
seem any easier to read to me. :-(

I know where the 0.25 comes from[1], but it seems that that is what's
supposed to happen.  I haven't figured out why that 0.25 gets propagated
but it does.
> Perhaps, it is the best to go back to revision 1.17 and then to put in
> again the changes up to revision 1.23. I have not much experience with
>   
Unless we can figure it out, I agree that reverting to 1.17 is probably
the right thing.  Like Robert says, cvs probably won't really help with
putting back the other changes.  1.18 changed too much to make the later
revisions easily patchable.  It has to be done the hard way.

Ray

[1]  The 0.25 comes from signdiff in compar.lisp, in the second cond
clause that runs (numer rhs)  where rhs is ((rat simp) 1 4).  This gets
passed down to signdiff-special which sets odds to b-0.25.  These lines
have not been changed in a very long time, so I think this is probably
what is supposed to happen.  When signdiff returns back to sign-mplus,
the second cond clause updates the local variables with the value of
odds computed from signdiff.  This seems to be what's supposed to
happen.  Finally, this odds expression is what gets asked.