Speed up the maxima _commands() list #40737
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The maxima _commands() method was implemented in terms of the
tab-completion method, completions(), which goes one-letter-at-a-time
and is very slow as a result. We reimplement it directly to call
maxima's apropos() with the empty string. This gets all commands in
one shot. We also clean up the list of commands a little by excluding
some junk results. The diff (eliminated elements) from the old list to
the new one is,
{'SPLITS\\IN\\Q',
'erf_%iargs',
'exp-form',
'is-boole-eval',
'is-boole-verify',
'maybe-boole-eval',
'maybe-boole-verify',
'sstatus-aux',
'time\\/\\/call',
'unknown\\?',
'zeta%pi'}
The faster method should help avoid warnings in the CI about the test
being too slow.
This parameter was recently made obsolete, and as this is an internal method, we can just delete it.
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fchapoton
reviewed
Aug 31, 2025
It probably doesn't matter, but we should prefer the maxima library interface anywhere that performance might be an issue. We now test the _commands() method with maxima_calculus (a library interface) rather than "maxima" (a pexpect interface).
If we use a "\" instead of "-" in the list of bad characters, we catch all of the existing bad names, but get things like "SPLITS\\ IN\\ Q" as well.
The _commands() method checks the first character of each command to make sure that it starts with a letter. This _was_ searching a tuple (containing 'a' to 'Z'), but it seems to be much faster if we concatenate them all into one string and search that instead.
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I added a few more small improvements, mainly to eliminate two junk names that snuck in, and to speed up the first-character check. The switch from |
fchapoton
reviewed
Aug 31, 2025
Using python's walrus operator we can simplify the list comprehension that builds the list of maxima _commands(). Essentially this allows us to save the result of foo.strip() and work with that rather than the original unstripped string foo.
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cool, thank you! |
vbraun
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Sep 4, 2025
sagemathgh-40737: Speed up the maxima _commands() list Reimplement the `_commands()` method that queries maxima for a list of valid commands. Gives about a 9x speedup here, and should eliminate one of the CI "slow doctest" warnings. URL: sagemath#40737 Reported by: Michael Orlitzky Reviewer(s): Frédéric Chapoton, Michael Orlitzky
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Reimplement the
_commands()method that queries maxima for a list of valid commands. Gives about a 9x speedup here, and should eliminate one of the CI "slow doctest" warnings.