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?
My guess is that it would require substantial Octave
hacking, and maybe some Maxima hacking as well. But it
is certainly feasible. It is relatively easy to create
add-on libraries for Octave using the shared-object
mechanism, which I believe is common to all Unices;
equivalent functionality in Windows is more difficult.
The hard part on the Octave side would be adding hooks
in the command line processor to funnel symbolic
expressions to Maxima. I would be inclined to execute
Maxima as a separate process and have them talk to
each other via pipes or sockets; this is straightforward.
Handling Maxima errors would be a major concern.
In Matlab, one explicitly declares some variables are
symbolic, and then expressions containing those symbols
are sent to Maple for evaluation -- if I'm not mistaken
one doesn't usually explicitly invoke Maple. (What I
know about that is based on reading the reference manual.)
There are doubtless other ways to handle the interface.
For what it's worth,
Robert Dodier
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