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Better docs for describe
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fingolfin committed Mar 3, 2022
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17 changes: 12 additions & 5 deletions src/Groups/GAPGroups.jl
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Expand Up @@ -977,15 +977,22 @@ non-splitting extension of a normal subgroup $N$ with the factor group
`G`$/N$, where $N$ is the center or the derived subgroup or the Frattini
subgroup of `G`.
For infinite groups or groups for which finiteness is not (yet) known (e.g.
finitely presented groups), it may not be possible to print much useful
information. We make a best-effort attempt, but in general this is a hard
problem.
For infinite groups, if the group is known to be finitely generated and
abelian or free, a reasonable description is printed.
For general infinite groups, or groups for which finiteness is not (yet) known,
not much if anything can be done. In particular we avoid potentially expensive
checks such as computing the size of the group or whether it is abelian.
While we do attempt a few limited fast checks for finiteness and
commutativity, these will not detect all finite or commutative groups.
Thus calling `describe` again on the same group after additional information
about it become known to Oscar may yield different outputs.
!!! note
- for finitely presented groups, even deciding if the group is trivial
is impossible in general; the same holds for most other properties,
like whether the group is finite, abelian, etc.
like whether the group is finite, abelian, etc.,
- there is in general no "nice" decomposition of `G`,
- there may be several decompositions of `G`,
- nonisomorphic groups may yield the same `describe` result,
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