Re: Bug In Python Script May Have Affected Hundreds Of Studies

> A set of Python scripts popularly used to analyze chemistry data has had
> a long-standing bug in that it had assumptions about the order in which
> filenames in a directory would be returned
> <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/chemists-discover-cross-platform-python-scripts-not-so-cross-platform/>.
> The code worked correctly on Windows and an older version of macOS, but
> discrepancies crept in on Linux and on newer macOS.
>
> The fix was to sort the returned names into a consistent order before
> processing. I just note this Twitter comment from one of the original
> authors:
>
>     When I wrote the scripts 6 years ago, the OS was able to handle the
>     sorting.
>
> That would never have been true on Linux. There have never been any
> guarantees about ordering of directory entries on POSIX-compliant
> systems. Note the docs
> <https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html#glob.glob> clearly say:
>
>     Whether or not the results are sorted depends on the file system.
>
> One of the researchers who found (and fixed) the bug says
>
>     ... he hopes the paper will get scientists to pay more attention to
>     the computational side of experiments in the future.

The upside: the script was made available with the study.
Lots of studies cannot be replicated due to data and/or
scripts/programs not being made available as well. Hence the "open
science" movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science).

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
_______________________________________________
wlug mailing list -- [email protected] | To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/postorius/lists/wlug.list.waikato.ac.nz