Making Maxima be Mathematica compatible...

seberino@spawar.navy.mil wrote:
>>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.

yes.  Just because the 2 programs have the same command
names does not mean the commands do the same things.
Expand for example is different.  So is cos.

Even more significant is the fact that moving a program
from one environment to the other would require, in some
cases, a close imitation of the internal data structures
of Mathematica.

> 
> 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?

No, it would not be a subset.  Except for exact computation
on integers and polynomials in one variable with integer coefficients, and
even there, they display in different orders... I'm not sure
they do precisely the same thing.  If all you want is
a command language that looks like a subset of Mathematica but has
semantics taken from Maxima, then that is trivially done already
if the subset is small enough. You can build it up incrementally
I guess...  how are they the same??
for example, these expressions are acceptable to either program:
1234
1+1
x*y+z
x^2+1/2



> 
> Chris
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