[GiNaC-devel] printing of class power

[Richard B. Kreckel]

Dear Vladimir,

On 1/8/25 11:36 AM, Vladimir V. Kisil via GiNaC-devel wrote:
> 	Your proposal seems to be sensible to me. As a variation of it:
>    can "print_deterministic" be just a flag for any declared printing
>    method? It may be not so useful in outputs for C or Python, but
>    printing a tree in a deterministic way may be an advantage.

That goes beyond my suggestion and I'm not sure it is possible.

Anyway, we must be very careful with 'faking' a print order for the 
purpose of reproducibility. It is a double-edged sword: If you think 
that 'e' is 'a-b' you expect 'e.op(0)' to be 'a' and 'e.op(1)' to be 
'-b' but that is not going to be fulfilled by deterministic print 
orders. I think this suggests that the print order 'print_tree' should 
remain as it is. After all, it is mainly for debugging purposes.

By the same token, I think that the print order of ginsh should remain 
as it is - non-deterministic - because ginsh offers the 'op(e,n)' 
built-in function. Making ginsh's print only order differ from that of 
'op' would be too confusing.

All my best,
    -richy.
-- 
Richard B. Kreckel
<https://in.terlu.de/~kreckel/>