"S.H.M.J. Houben" wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> I just wanted to add a few remarks:
>
> 1. About reimplementing Maxima in another language.
>
> This will be extremely difficult, since Maxima uses quite
> a lot of special features of Lisp. In particular, it uses
> the Lisp lists and symbols, it uses the bignum and
> rational number support from Lisp, and it uses the
> introspection facilities in Lisp. The latter makes
> things possible such as simple defining a function $foobar
> on the Lisp level and then having it immediately available
> as foobar() in Maxima. Try that in C++...
>
I just want to note that each Lisp system has compiler
which actually does such a translation. Sometimes to C,
sometimes to Assembler, sometimes to some special
bytecode depending on concrete Lisp implementation.
Besides IMHO Lisp based computer algebra systems
are more flexible than ones written in say C or other
similar procedure language. If you write your package
for Reduce or Maxima (Lisp) you can easily use
low level features. Nothing like this is possible
in Mathematica or Maple (C).
So let Maxima remains Maxima.
> One problem is that one might want nicely typeset output
> (i.e. two-dimensional formulas, and not in ASCII art as
> the current maxima does, but with real intergral signs.)
>
> This could be implemented by adding a new output format to Maxima.
> Using this output format, Maxima would
> 1. output formulas in 1D, and
> 2. add control sequences that indicate 2D layout and special
> symbols such as integral signs and arrows.
>
In fact such front-end to Maxima already exists. This is maxima mode
in TeXmacs. It is a bit slow and maybe it is not optimal solution but it
works. There is also similar front-end <=> kernel GUI implementation
in Reduce.
> Just some ideas.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Stephan
>
>
Best wishes,
Vadim
--
[ Vadim V. Zhytnikov <vvzhy@mail.ru> <vvzhy@td.lpi.ac.ru> ]