A Strange problem

[Allan MacLeod <Allan.MacLeod@uws.ac.uk>]

Over the weekend, I was developing some software in Pari which needs to check whether rational polynomials are squares over the rationals.

 

I used  isqsquare(polynomial,&root)

 

At the start of the program, everything worked fine and the roots, when found, were rational.

 

At a certain point, however, the roots changed to having real coefficients which completely screwed the code.

 

I got round the problem by writing my own “idiot” test subroutine, which works fine.

 

This problem occurred using Pari 2.7.2, Pari 2.6.0, and Pari 2.3.4.

 

Any suggestions as to what I did wrong?

 

 

Allan MacLeod

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