Re: [Axiom-developer] Ability to guarantee a non-hanging Axiom?

[Martin Rubey]

C Y <address@hidden> writes:

> Is there a way to have Axiom, in cases where a calculation goes
> for n seconds without returing an answer Axiom pauses the calculation
> and prompts the user if they want to continue, and if so for how long? 

I don't see the advantage over Ctrl-C, i.e., simply interupting the
computation. 

I would rather suggest:

* a convention like MuPAD's userinfo variable, that makes Axiom spit out
  information (in mathematical terms) about what it's doing currently.

* for selected algorithms, where a bound on the running time is known, to spit
  out this time. However, care has to be taken: "sort" for example has a known
  upper bound on running time, interpolation also. But you wouldn't want Axiom
  to say "sorting 5 elements, which will take approximately 0.000001 seconds" a
  million times. I am also concerned about efficiency a little here -- even if
  we chose to program: don't say anything unless it takes longer than 10
  seconds, we would have the overhead of calculating the bound on the running
  time.

Martin