sage: singular4: API or interpreter ?

[Jerome BENOIT]

Hello Forum:

In the Debian wiki dedicated to Sage [1], we read:

 Singular 4.0.3 is now in Debian but unfortunately its API is completely
 incompatible from 3.1.7 and the latter is what Sage are using.

This is very unfortunate indeed.

On the other hand, on the Sage page dedicated to the Singular interface [2] we read:

 This interface is extremely flexible, since it’s exactly like typing into the Singular interpreter,
 and anything that works there should work here.

Of course, I may quote the remaining:

  The interface offers three pieces of functionality:

    singular_console() - A function that dumps you into an interactive command-line Singular session.
    singular(expr, type='def') - Creation of a Singular object. This provides a Pythonic interface to Singular.
      For example, if f=singular(10), then f.factorize() returns the factorization of 10 computed using Singular.
    singular.eval(expr) - Evaluation of arbitrary Singular expressions, with the result returned as a string.

  Of course, there are polynomial rings and ideals in Sage as well (often based on a C-library interface to Singular).
  One can convert an object in the  Singular interpreter interface to Sage by the method sage().


So I guess that what might cause troubles is the very last paragraph.
Even so, my understanding is that the Singular library did not experience any big change.
I also understand that the Debian package of Singular4 rationalize a bit the library dispatching,
but these changes are transparent to autotools.

What force us to stick to the old dead branch 3.1.7 ?


Best wishes,
Jerome

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Sage
[2] http://sagemanifolds.obspm.fr/doc/reference/interfaces/sage/interfaces/singular.html