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Re: Mathematica bug on Sun4

  • To: mathgroup
  • Subject: Re: Mathematica bug on Sun4
  • From: fateman at renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Richard Fateman)
  • Date: Fri, 5 May 89 11:21:40 CDT
  • Reply-to: stevec at ncsa.uiuc.edu

[Richard, in his message below brings up a number of good points.
I would like to hear from members of this mailing list about what
bug reports they would like me to send to the list and what others
to keep to myself and WRI.  My initial thoughts were that users
might like to be aware of changes between 1.1 and 1.2 and that a
number of bugs have been fixed.  I realize it is difficult to know
for sure if a bug is in Mathematica itself, in the operating system,
compiler of the hardware or in the user's code.  I can try to limit
bug reports to Mathematica bugs only or to help with bugs in a user's
code, but I am not sure I can always judge what kind of a bug exists.
Comments please. - smc]

I don't know what to make of all of this stuff comparing 1.1 to 1.2,
memory violations, etc.  It obviously is not in the best interests
of anyone (other than WRI, and I'm not sure of that either) 
to have a whole mailing-list of individuals, almost all of
whom are relatively naive, look at (perhaps buggy) code
that runs differently on different machines.  

In dealing with Macsyma, I generally view any discrepancy between
(say) VAX and Sun  or Sun 2/3/4/ ... operations as a bug in
either the operating system, the lisp system, or (rarely) a hardware
bug.  It is NOT a bug in Macsyma, and I expect whoever is responsible
for support of the substructure to fix it.

If Mathematica has different SOURCE code for Sun 3 and 4, etc.  then
its problem is different.  But since only WRI has access to source,
what point is there to telling us all about such bugs?

 Regards,
   Richard





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