On Thursday 11 October 2001 15:02, Raymond Toy wrote:
>
> Good idea, and it's GPL too so the license is compatible with maxima.
>
> However, it looks like it's in C. Doing a foreign function interface
> to it may not be easy. And certainly not portable.
>
> But this would be very nice to have....
>
> Ray
This is what I found at the home page of cmucl:
#CMUCL: a high-performance, free Common Lisp implementation
#. . .
#Here is a summary of its main features:
#. . .
#a foreign function interface which allows interfacing with C code and system
#libraries, including shared libraries on most platforms, and direct access
#to Unix system calls.
And from the pari home page I get:
#PARI-GP is a software package for computer-aided number theory. It consists
#of a C library, libpari (with optional assembler cores for some popular
#architectures) . . .
Shouldn't that be enough? I don't know about programming and interfacing and
all that, so maybe I'm just missing the point. But to me it looks like
maxima's strength is in manipulating formulas, maintaining a knowledge base,
understanding context and stuff like that, and not in numerical calculations,
graphics interface and by the way not in user interface. If I look at it as a
kind of free Mathematica or Maple, to me it looks like a looser. But if I
look at it as a kind of linux kernel for scientific software, it looks really
exciting to me.
Jürgen