Subject: Making Maxima be Mathematica compatible...
From: seberino at spawar
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 16:25:14 -0800
> 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.
Forgetting about graphics for the moment and just
focusing on calculations....
When you say that "one would have to reverse-engineer hundreds of thousands
of code" do you mean that a Mathematica /subset/ is easy to
do but that *full compatibility* would be a ton of work?
I certainly agree with that.
Maxima already is very mature apparently with respect
to integration, differentiation and other basic college
freshmen needs. I think all would agree that coding
the driver to convert Mathematica strings into Maxima
style strings is trivial in comparision to the
work *already done* on the mathematical engines
of Maxima itself (e.g. integration engine).
A "Mathematica2Maxima" driver + existing Maxima code +
some polishing would certainly be quite a healthy
sized subset of Mathematica 2.0 don't you think?
Chris