Maple or Mathematica to maxima conversion

While some parts of the translation are simple, it is not
clear how to handle different scope rules and function call
disciplines.  Maple has a kind of phoney way of returning
multiple values by setting certain trailing parameters as
call by reference  (or maybe even call by name).

Also binding certain values affect global behavior. Like
precision.




Here's another approach, which is NOT easy, but I have
thought about some.
I believe that a parser for Maple could be done by using
a parser generator and the Maple syntax (assuming it is
LALR(1)).  This plus the lexical analysis should take about
10 pages of code.

And then implement the Maple kernel in Lisp. It should
only take 50-100 pages of code.

Then you can take any program written in the Maple
language and run it in Lisp.  You can also make
judicious substitutions in the pseudo kernel of
Maple, e.g. change the way arithmetic is done, or
simplification, etc.

Difficulties:  finding out EXACTLY what the Maple kernel
does is not easy.  (But there is no way around it if
you are going to run Maple programs, regardless of the
syntax... either you implement kernel in Maxima-ese or
Lisp).
Using all that "intermediate" Maple code that belongs to
Maplesoft.

That is, if some contributed "free" code is written to
use some visible but copyrighted Maplesoft Maple-code, one
does not have the rights to use it.  (e.g. the Maple integration
program can be examined by any Maple owner.  It can't legally
be moved to Maxima though.  At least I don't think so.)

For what it is worth, the same technique could be used for
imitating Mathematica except that the language is not LALR(1);
fortunately I wrote a parser that does this.

Writing a Mathematica kernel in lisp is more work, since it
is larger than Maple's kernel, very diffusely scattered, and
fairly secret.  You can, to a limited extent, defeat some
of Mathematica's security by removing the "Protected" attribute
from a function, and then list stuff.  For example, I
got  from ??CosIntegral

its definition in terms of ExpIntegral, and other junk as well



dan.stanger@ieee.org wrote:

> I am currently working on converting Dr. Thomasset's program which
> converts maple to mupad to produce maxima code.  I have quite a bit
> of the syntax done, the semantics is more difficult.
> Dan Stanger
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