On Thursday 31 March 2005 01:57 am, Robert Dodier wrote:
> Concerning portability of Maxima to various Lisps,
>
> Richard Fateman wrote:
> > I think that this goal has been a substantial
> > distraction, but as long as it hasn't required me
> > to do much, I can't really argue.
>
> I have to say I'm completely in agreement w/ Prof Fateman
> on this point. The existence of multiple incompatible
> versions of Lisp is a historical accident which, for
> reasons beyond my comprehension, has been perpetrated
> indefinitely.
It's slowly being untangled. GCL is moving toward ANSI, and most of
the others are there. So the effort required should be less and
less over time.
> This situation doesn't help Maxima at all,
> and the extremely valuable time of some contributors
> is dissipated in resolving arbitrary minor differences.
That's true, but I still think redundancy on such a fundamental
point as having a free lisp to run on is a Good Thing. And they
are definitely getting better, thanks to active development teams.
If Maxima can run on two totally different systems and get the same
mathematical result, it is a reassurance that there are no subtle
problems with one of the lisps. Same thing goes for operating
systems - at some level the lisp depends on the OS behavior being
correct. In fact, this is also my argument for why both Axiom and
Maxima are necessary - they provide a totally independant check on
each other's correctness. They could both be wrong, of course, but
every little bit helps.
Really, it would be nice if this type of software could be developed
using proof systems, but before that makes sense we would probably
need something like Coyotos to mature, since without a provably
correct OS I don't see how you could prove your application
behavior. (To full rigor anyway.)
> Incidentally, I count 633 messages in the 2004 mailing
> list archive (of 2176 in all) which mention at least one
> of gcl, cmucl, clisp, or sbcl. I count 197 messages
> which mention at least two Lisp versions.
>
> (I did the counting with the nset functions. w00t!)
I understand the frustration. I do agree that it would be nice if
the time spent on these issues were to go into mathematical/feature
work. But I think the best way to ensure Maxima is here for the
long haul is to make it as portable as possible. Look where we
would be if Berkeley had decided not to mess with porting it off
the original PDPs! Maxima has outlived many lisps and many
platforms, and hopefully it will continue to do so in the future.
(I guess I get a little infected by Tim Daly's 30 year horizon
discussions.)
CY
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