Making Maxima be Mathematica compatible...

Richard

Thanks for the email.  I'm really impressed with
the work you've done and am excited to chat
with you about it.

OK, let me give you the background you asked
for then I'll ask questions after...

I have a Ph.D. in physics and almost all my work
for over 10 years has involved computational
physics aka scientific computing.  I have a passion
for doing numerical work elegantly and accurately.

I've used Mathematica for as long as I can remember
for various projects and love it.

I am only interested in computer algebra systems
that are Mathematica compatible even if just for
a subset of Mathematica.

I've been writing a little C toy Mathematica just
for fun.

I want this little C toy program use call Maxima
somehow for Integrate[..] and D[..] (Mathematica
functions for integration and differentiation)
and perhaps other things.

My program will parse user input strings into
expression data structures.

Are there any docs somewhere to help someone
in doing this??? I thought of two
ways to do this and don't know if they are the best
ways or how hard:

1. Make Maxima object file I can like with C code
   just like people do with Fortran object files.

2. Run Maxima in a separate thread and communicate
   with pipes.

Performance and efficiency will be concerns
obviously too.

Sincerely,

Chris




On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 08:15:59AM -0800, Richard Fateman wrote:
> 
> 
> seberino@spawar.navy.mil wrote:
> > I see threads on list about people converting
> > Mathematica code to Maxima code with scripts
> > and such...
> > 
> > Any talk/interest in making Maxima be
> > able to speak Mathematica rather than
> > having  different syntax/style to learn?
> 
> There is a free Lisp-language Mathematica parser
> (MockMMA) that I wrote.  It includes a rudimentary
> evaluator and pattern matcher. It is roughly
> Mathematica 2.0 equivalent syntactically.
> 
> But to make something really work like Mathematica,
> one would have to reverse-engineer hundreds of thousands
> of lines of code.
> 
> Perhaps you could be more specific as to what
> you wish to do.  If all you need to do is to have
> Maxima allow you to write Sin[x] instead of sin(x),
> that is easy.  If you want to write Plot3D[...]
> into Maxima and get the same exact results as Mathematica,
> that is not easy.
> 
> RJF
> 
> > 
> > Chris
> 

-- 
_______________________________________

Dr. Christian Seberino
SPAWAR Systems Center San Diego
Code 2363
49590 Lassing Road, Room A339
San Diego, CA 92152-6147
U.S.A.

Phone: (619) 553-7940
Fax:   (619) 553-1269
Email: seberino@spawar.navy.mil
_______________________________________