[GAP Forum] Runtime

[Samuel Lelièvre]

Some commands will make GAP enter an infinite loop,
and you will never get an answer. In such a case, it's
better to stop GAP (by typing Ctrl-C), for many reasons:

1. It is better than letting the computer run out of memory,
(here again for many reasons!).

2. When you interrupt GAP, the error message you get
will give you precious information about what function is
running at that time. You can then read the doc for that
function to check what algorithms are being run.

3. Even better, when interrupted by Ctrl-C (just like when
an error is encountered), GAP enters debugging mode,
and you can investigate what function or method was
being applied, what the arguments were, etc.

If your computation involves several steps, or has loops
such as "while" and "for" loops, then a good way to figure
out what is going on is to add, as Benjamin suggests,
print instructions inside your loops (or at key points of
your computation) to print partial results and/or values of
parameters and what operations are carried out.

Samuel

2014-07-17 2:29 GMT-04:00 Sugandha Maheshwary <msugandha.87 at gmail.com>:
> How long shall I wait to get an output in GAP? At times, a program runs for
> hours (or even days) but their is no output or fail prompt. What is the
> maximum time that a command in GAP might take?
>
> Thanks
>
> Sugandha.
> _______________________________________________
> Forum mailing list
> Forum at mail.gap-system.org
> http://mail.gap-system.org/mailman/listinfo/forum