On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 10:02, Richard Fateman wrote:
> On the topic of Octave, which I gather is a GPL version of Matlab...
> How hard would it be to make Octave be a front end for Maxima,
> similar to Matlab with symbolic toolkit being a front end for
> Maple? I have only given this 15 seconds of thought, but maybe
> someone familiar with Octave can say something.
> RJF
I use Octave every day. I definitely think that some sort Maxima-Octave
link would be useful. Even though I have thought about linking the two
quite a bit, I still have conceptual questions about how the link should
work. Unfortunately, I have not seen the Matlab symbolic toolkit.
Somebody has already presented some Maxima-Octave code on the Octave
list. It allows Octave to send a string to Maxima, which evaluates it
and returns another string. I don't see how that would be helpful at all
-- why not just have one window running Octave and another running
Maxima? The basic problem is that Octave doesn't really deal with
symbolic data. Perhaps we could have Maxima return expressions in Octave
form in such a way that Octave would evaluate them, but I'm still not
really sure how helpful that would be.
Since Maxima deals with numerical *and* symbolic data, it might make
more sense to have Maxima operate as a front end to Octave. There are
issues with this approach also: doing purely numerical operations in
Maxima is annoying. Expressions tend to end up partially symbolic, e.g.,
(C1) 1.1 + sqrt(2);
(D1) SQRT(2) + 1.1
How would you imagine the interface working?
--Jim
P.S. There are also a set of technical issues involved in linking Maxima
and Octave. I see multiple ways of solving them, so I don't think there
should be any insurmountable problems there.