--- "S.H.M.J. Houben"
<houben@natlab.research.philips.com> 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 thought I'd float it out there and see.
Obviously there are sufficient good reasons not to.
> Having that said, I think the code base in Maxima
> could stand a cleanup. For starters, the code is
mostly in
> UPPER CASE, although that is easy to fix. I also saw
> quite a number of occurences of (go ...) (Lisp's
goto
> construct). More in general, the code is often
difficult to
> read and could use more commenting. The code is not
> very consistent: that much already shows by seeing
file
> extensions such as .lisp, .lsp and even .LISP all
used.
That cleanup would be an extremely good idea, and IMHO
would probably be good to make the first priority, to
keep things organized - writing new code is easier if
what's already there is standard, clean and commented.
> Another problem is all the special support for
> things like Multics and the old Lisp machine. I
don't see
> how we could possibly hope to keep all this in sync
with
> new additions.
Are there still any of those machines in actual use?
We may not have to worry about that at all, and if we
don't maybe we can clean up the code further by
removing those parts.
> Perhaps a policy should be developed on which
> platforms are officially supported, and what is done
with
> code for non-supported platforms (retained as-is?
updated
> to track the rest of the source, even if it cannot
be tested?
> simply removed?)
OK, here's my reasoning - older versions won't vanish,
and will still have this support. We should not
update code we can't test - the minute we do that
someone will use it to do something important and a
zillion bugs will fall out. Also, if no one is using
those parts, why waste the effort? We can just say
version X is the last version which supports platform
Y. My feeling is that the best thing would probably
be to remove it in new versions, in the interests of a
clean, smooth system, but as I said that's only IMHO
and those who know better should be the ones listened
to.
> 2. About GUI support
>
> The current xmaxima talks over a pipe to the real
> maxima. Doing the GUI directly from Lisp would be
more
> elegant; unfortunately, there is no such thing as a
> standard GUI interface for Lisp. So I think that
the pipe
> idea is still the best idea:
>
> 1. The Lisp code remains portable
> 2. Emacs people can still use it
> 3. The GUI can be implemented in an arbitrary
> programming language.
I agree. I have a glade interface template at
http://mathshield.sourceforge.net with a few of the
basics, and there is a group in Italy working on a
widget which may be of considerable help to us in the
graphical display of equations but things like
plotting would still have to be handled somehow.
> Note that Mathematica also has the kernel in a
> separate process, so this is apparently not an
impediment
> for popularity.
>From the user standpoint it doesn't matter - it's what
they see that counts.
> 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.)
As I mentioned earlier, there is a project at
http://cs.unibo.it/~lpadovan/mml-widget/ which might
be able to help us in that department. It doesn't
have editing capabilities yet, but I believe that
support is planned.
> 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.
Actually, what I had hoped to do was use the mml
widget above and teach maxima to output mathml - Dr.
Barton Willis
http://www.unk.edu/acad/math/people/willisb/ has
already done some work along those lines and was kind
enough to send me his code. He doesn't use the
version intended for browsers and the like to display,
but that shouldn't be too hard to add (famous last
words)
> Every front end could then typeset the output it
> received from Maxima over the pipe in a manner
suitable
> for its intended audience. In this way, one could
have
> both an Emacs front-end and a C++ GUI front-end
> talking to the same Maxima kernel.
That's almost certainly the best way to handle it.
That way, Richard can have an interface which works
for him on the scripting/power usage, and we wimps can
have our GUI. We may want to come up with our own
communication syntax, or maybe use mathml/TeX/whatever
(thanks to Richard maxima can already do TeX output).
Or maybe even be flexible enough to let the front end
specify ASCII, TeX, or MathML. That would probably be
the most powerful setup. Heck, if mozilla really does
include mathml support and abiword starts using it for
their stuff, we might be able to do some really wild
and crazy interfacing.
> Just some ideas.
We like ideas :-)
> Greetings,
>
> Stephan
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