bug in introspection (probably easy to fix)

[William Stein]

See near the bottom below. In particular the X.points?? input should fail gracefully rather than going boom with an eval error. Closing this ticket does not necessarily mean fixing anything more than making this fail gracefully.

> 
>  I had a Sage worksheet that created an Elliptic curve
>  (E=EllipticCurve([0,17]))
>  and then invoked E.rational_points(10).
>  The code has obviously changed as it now expects
>  different parameters and needs to be E.rational_points(bound=10).
>  The real problems is I no longer get all the rational points. Maybe
>  the
>  definition of bound has changed? I had assumed it was a logarithmic
>  bound on the points, but I get only the first few points (max X=4).
>  
>  I then tried to follow through the code and it's changed a lot since I
>  first looked
>  at it. rational_points() is now defined in .../schemes/generic/
>  algebraic_schemes
>  and I'm unable to figure out where to go from there. The code reads:
>  
>  ...
>   if F == None:
>             F = self.base_ring()
>         X = self(F)
>  ...
>   return X.points(bound)
>  
>  Substituting the first part into my worksheet, with substituting E for
>  self, I get
>  X is Abelian group of points on Elliptic Curve defined by y^2  = x^3 +
>  17
>  over Rational Field.
>  
>  Next I try:
>   X.points??
>  
>  and get
>  ---------------------
>  Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>   File "/home/bill/.sage/sage_notebook/worksheets/bill/5/code/16.py",
>  line 6, in <module>
>     print _support_.source_code("", globals())
>   File "/sage/current/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sage/server/
>  support.py", line 154, in source_code
>     obj = eval(s, globs)
>   File "<string>", line 0
>  
>     ^
>  SyntaxError: unexpected EOF while parsing
>  ----------------------
>  Not much help there...
>  Is this a  bug, two bugs, or am I just being my usual stupid self?
>  

You score +1 for at least one bug (the second one).  The first
regarding the bound is *probably* related to changes John Cremona
made to elliptic curves, and I hope he will comment on them soon.
I've made your second bug above trac # 

[William Stein]

This is already fixed. First, I can't figure out how to replicate any sort of X.points?? problem. For me that works just fine. Also, the questionable eval above in the traceback is as of sage-3.0.1 already wrapped in a try/except block.