bug in continued fraction expansion ? / applying patches

Richard Fateman <fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu> writes:
> I continue to object generally to patches and files whose authorship
> can be discerned only by examining the separate change logs, so any
> alterations to pre-existing functions should have comments identifying
> authors, too.

A serious (and hopefully non-flaming) question: Why should you care who
wrote lines 245 - 283 of the source-file foo.lisp?

Vaguely plausible answers I can think of:

 (1) I want to rely on the author's authority in the field to be able to
     assume the code is right.

 (2) I want to know when a function changed from the version that was in
     commercial Macysma.

 (3) I don't want to run any code written by <someone>.

Am I missing your motivation here? I would say that none of these cases
support your call for littering source files with attribution
comments for the following reasons:

 (a) They generally end up out of sync with the actual author of the
     line at hand.

 (b) If a minor bug gets fixed in an algorithm, should there be an
     attribution note in the source file?

 (c) What about if someone ports an existing function to use a new
     interface to other code that's changed?

To me, (b) and (c) are problems that are both practical and theoretical
and (a) is merely practical. Note that if you are willing to use a
version control system (which Maxima has done for some decades now), all
of these problems are solved for you, without the need to leave
uninformative comments all over a code base which is distinctive by its
lack of explanatory comments. Grr.

Right, rant over. Will go back to my algebra code now.


Rupert
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