Hi Mike/Dave.
Last week, Mike, you asked me to follow on from my earlier reports and check
the remote math server stuff with your revised XMaxima interface. I
apologise for my late reply but I am caught up in some urgent work at
present (and for a while to come) and have had little time to help out.
Intro:
Unfortunately I have lost track of which version to use, so I cut to the
finish and tried today's Maxima CVS version, built with today's CVS version
of GCL. These tests were run under Windows 2000 on a PII 333 MHz CPU using
the stable version of Active State TCL (8.4.3). Generally everthing went
well.
In particular I did not observe any of the socket problems previously
reported. I wonder whether the version of TCL which comes with the
executable XMaxima installation has troubles in that regard?
Pretest Hacks:
After installation (make install, with configuration prefix set to
"g:/maxm"), I renamed the "bin/xmaxima" script to "bin/xmaxima.tcl", renamed
"bin/maxima" to "bin/maxima.sh" and then inserted a version of Dave's
minimal "bin/xmaxima.bat" as follows:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
rem Trival maxima.bat
set MAXIMA_PREFIX=..
start %MAXIMA_PREFIX%/lib/maxima/5.9.0rc1/binary-gcl/maxima.exe -eval (run)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tests:
Then I double clicked on the renamed "xmaxima.tcl" which started the Xmaxima
shell and a separate DOS shell with maxima running in it, whose stdin and
stdout appeared to be redirected to the XMaxima shell (this being an
artifact of the batch script I presume).
The examples in the XMaxima primer seemed to work OK, as did the
"Help/Maxima Help" menu
When I tried the other Help menu options, however (eg "Help/Project Page") I
got Tcl errors as follows:
---------------------------------------------------
couldn't execute "start": no such file or directory
couldn't execute "start": no such file or directory
while executing
"exec start http://maxima.sourceforge.net &"
("eval" body line 1)
invoked from within
"eval {exec start} http://maxima.sourceforge.net &"
(menu invoke)
---------------------------------------------------
couldn't execute "start": no such file or directory
couldn't execute "start": no such file or directory
while executing
"exec start http://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima &"
("eval" body line 1)
invoked from within
"eval {exec start} http://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima &"
(menu invoke)
---------------------------------------------------
Trying some of the netmath stuff at U. Texas in "wfs/courses" (specifically
the ODE stuff) went perfectly eg
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/courses/427k/427k-1.html
and
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/courses/427k/nthtofirst.html
These pages are a tour-de-force of XMaxima's capabilities - I wish I had
been able to do this when I studied DE's!!
Other stuff eg:
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/courses/408c/plotnewton.html
resulted in messages such as:
-------------------------------------------------------------
can't read "mess": no such variable
can't read "mess": no such variable
while executing
"M "$mess:\n%s\nYou may need to Restart" $err"
(procedure "sendMaximaCall" line 25)
invoked from within
"sendMaximaCall $w "$form;\n" [list maxima_insert $win $this $nextResult
pdata($maximaSocket,result)]"
(procedure "eval_maxima" line 10)
invoked from within
"eval_$prog $program $w $this $nextResult"
(procedure "doInvoke" line 49)
invoked from within
"doInvoke .browser.t8.text @144,195 "
(command bound to event)
-------------------------------------------------------------
Maybe those pages are defunct, or the servers they are calling on?
You probably don't need this, but for the record, another negative comment
is that maybe the plot menu options need attention (if I I recall correctly
this never worked right anyway). For example clicking on the "Save" menu
option in plot windows caused a set of axes to be drawn over the plot, but
nothing seems to be done. For example, I don't get a requestor asking for a
file name to save and it took me a while to work out that the file was saved
to a default file name.
It would be good if there was more control over labels etc, but this is not
a show stopper in any case.
Running the tests gave a bunch of good results until:
"Could not find `trigrat' using paths in FILE_SEARCH_LISP,SYSTEM"
This is probably a result of the bodgy way I started XMaxima.
Restarting Maxima allowed me to continue unscathed.
Summary:
Lastly, I would just like to say thanks for the great work you are doing on
XMaxima - it really shows off what Maxima can do and is well worth saving in
my opinion.
If that Netmath site is kept alive then it should be a real winner for
Maxima (and for maths students around the world) - I had a lot of fun there.
Cheers
Mike Thomas.