Hello Thomas,
I have taken the liberty of forwarding your message to the Maxima list.
It seems to me you have terrific qualifications for contributing to Maxima.
I can think of a couple of areas you might consider:
-- There are a large number of minor bugs in various parts of the code.
See http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=4933&atid=104933
Many bug reports include suggested patches.
-- Implementation of new functionality in topics familiar to you.
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/docs/manual/en/maxima_33.html
has a list of the built-in functions which are related to arithmetic and
continued fractions. Perhaps you could merge in some functions
from PARI/GP ?? Just guessing here.
Thanks a lot for your interest in Maxima!
Robert Dodier
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thomas Baruchel
Date: Oct 5, 2005 12:03 PM
Subject: Contributing to Maxima
To: robert.dodier@gmail.com
Hi,
I discovered Maxima a few months ago, and decided to use it rather than
MuPAD for several kinds of reasons ; I am very happy of my choice, and
would be happy to be more involved in the software if I may help.
As an open-source programmer, I have already worked on numerical topics,
see http://contfrac.sourceforge.net/ in OCaml ou
http://eisseeker.sourceforge.net/ in C + Scheme
I am also a member of a surviving project called "computing pi", though
I am not really sure my pieces of code have been ever put on the site by the
maintainer (not looked for a very long time). Though I was a schemer rather
than a lisp-expert, I also decided to come to Lisp for several reasons also
(more portable than Scheme regarding the various implementations).
I am merely interested by numerical aspects (not at all by interface issues).
I am a continued-fraction fan, member of the seqfan mailing list (and
contributor to the Encyclopedy of Integer Sequences).
Arithmetic is for me a great thing. Recently I discovered the two
formulae: http://baruchel.thomas.free.fr/ that I submitted to
Bill Gosper, which found a simple proof for one of them and is still
looking at the other one.
I am interested in other languages also if this is an issue.
If you think I can be of any help, please let me know it.
Regards,
--
Thomas Baruchel