BuiltinFunction.__call__ is unnecessarily slow

[robertwb]

This was discovered when looking at #12615. Basically, foo(x) eventually calls x.foo() if it exists, but only after doing a lot of symbolic work (resulting in an order of magnitude slowdown for that example).

Apply:

• attachment: 13933-slow-call.v2.patch
• attachment: 13933-doctests.patch
• attachment: 13933-more-doctests.patch

CC: @burcin

Component: symbolics

Keywords: sd48

Author: Robert Bradshaw

Reviewer: Burcin Erocal, Karl-Dieter Crisman

Merged: sage-5.11.beta2

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/13933

[robertwb]

Any reason why this isn't a good idea?

[robertwb]

comment:1

Attachment: 13933-slow-call.patch.gz

[burcin]

Reviewer: Burcin Erocal

[burcin]

Author: Robert Bradshaw

[burcin]

comment:2

In principle it is a good idea. I did something similar in attachment: trac_1173-move_call.patch:ticket:1173.

Putting this in the Function class is overkill. User defined symbolic functions also inherit from that class. People might be very surprised if all symbolic functions magically tried to call methods of the same name before doing anything else. BuiltinFunction is the right place for this, as that is supposed to be the base class for all functions we define in the Sage library.

I agree that extracting the original parent can be delayed. The alt_name parameter is also a good idea.

Shall I adapt my patch? or are you going to revise yours?

[burcin]

Attachment: trac_13933-move_call.patch.gz

[burcin]

robert's patch rebased on top of move_call.patch