> < ^ Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1993 11:06:00 +0100
> < ^ From: Jean Michel <jmichel@math.jussieu.fr >
> ^ Subject: First impressions of 3.2

I have just installed 3.2 on my PC (a 66Mhz 486). The number of
gapstones has jumped from 16000 in 3.1 to 28000 in 3.2! Since the
improvement seen on the Sun sparc SLC is just 13000 to 16000, I conclude
that much of the improvement on the PC must be due to a better
C compiler. Impressive! (and congratulations!)

Also I like very much the facility offered by {} indexing, which
I timed as being 5 times faster than Sublist. However, I find
myself writing all the times things like:
l{[4..7]} or l{[3,5,9]}
could not a syntax like
l{4..7} or l{3,5,9}
be accepted to mean the same?

Also, polynomials are great, but I have trouble using them. Maybe it is
just me or the documentation: I have a polynomial over the integers
which I know is a product of cyclotomic polynomials plus a constant.
I want to find out exactly what product and what constant.
As it is I cannot do that, because I did not find the routine to do
the Euclidean division of two polynomials.
I found a routine for the Gcd, but not for
the division. Did I miss something?

One last thing: I notices that 3+[] and []+3 are now both accepted and
return []. I hastily changed my function
plus:=function(a,b)
if Length(a)=0 then return a;
elif Length(b)=0 then return b;
else return a+b;
fi;
end;
to calls of '+' again.
I say hastily because []+[] still does not work! I had to go back to
the old version for the case of equal-length vectors.
What's funny is that the error message has changed for that case:
it used to be 'Vectors: '+' incompatible types'
it is now: '+ not defined for Lists'

Jean MICHEL, DMI, ENS


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