I want to help too. Unfortunately, I don't know Lisp ( but I know C a little
bit).
I'm a brazilian Doctorate student of Physics, I ported Maxima for Mac OS X
---I believe GPL is the key for the development of theoretical research in
countries like Brazil.
I'm also learning Cocoa and I think that having part of the code translated
to C would easy the task of providing a Cocoa native GUI.
Lizardo H. C. M. Nunes
...But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the
Greeks foolishness;(...)but God has chosen the foolish things of the world
to confound the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to
confound the things which are strong;(I Cor.1:23&27)
> Message: 7
> Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 16:27:07 -0700 (PDT)
> From: C Y <smustudent1 at yahoo>
> Subject: Re: [Maxima] Future of maxima - question
> To: maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu
>
> One question I would like to bring up - since almost
> none of us are familiar with the current maxima code
> base, and few of us are qualified in Lisp, is there
> any way we could "translate" maxima into another, more
> widely used language?
>
> If this wouldn't be worthwhile then please forget I
> mentioned it, but here are the points I've been
> rolling around in my head which made me want to at
> least pose the question:
>
> 1) C/C++ are in my experience widely taught and used
> by schools, researchers, and other open source people,
> while Lisp programming is a relatively rare skill.
> Since any open source project needs as many good
> coders as possible, the odds are we would attract more
> help if our language were a little more commonly used.
>
>
> 2) We might be able to convince people who are writing
> routines for academic research projects or other high
> end applications to write libraries which could be
> added to maxima. Since as far as I know (those who
> know better feel free to correct me) most such
> projects don't code in Lisp nowadays, the odds of our
> being able to make use of those efforts is relatively
> small, barring some ability of Lisp to interface with
> other languages.
>
> There are some obvious downsides as well, such as
> moving from a working code base to basically creating
> a new one and the potential difficulty of moving
> concepts from Lisp to another language, but I thought
> I would at least put the idea out there.
>
> CY
>
>