Re: fork in Lisp? was: Maxima servermode: stability of commands....

Hi
I had lost this thread in my inbox,
just trying to catch up, apart from the initial problem about my integratio
n
with STACK,

I think I agree completely about the necessity of a cleaner "protocol" for
automating maxima
as a component of different projects.

What I can add to the discussion is that, at least in my case, I think STACK
relies on the
format returned by maxima. As I understand maxima has the capability of
returning different formats.

In any case, if a single format has to be chosen (IF), i think it should be
MathML, prefeferably Content-Mathml.
So to assure full interoperability, without possibile ambiguities.

In all this, I assumed that by "infix math" you meant the specific infix
math dialect maxima uses, since
I don't think there is such a standard (see the "rosetta" comparative
listing)

Just my 50 cents

Michele

On 5/11/06, Gerd Kortemeyer <korte at lite.msu.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi Robert,
>
> On May 10, 2006, at 8:42 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:
>
> >
> >> I guess what I am trying to say is that since it's not a human at the
> >> other end, the communication needs to be terse and very predictable:
> >> one input command produces one line of output.
> >
> > For your purposes, what format would make the least work for you
> > once you get the response? Infix math notation? Lisp? TeX?
> > MathML or other XML? Something else?
>
> For my purposes, simple infix math notation would be best:
>
> * I can feed that back into Maxima after some manipulations on my end
> * LON-CAPA already includes routines to nicely print or display infix
> math (e.g., turn it into LaTeX, get equation images or symbol font
> renderings, MathML, PDFs, etc)
>
> The simpler, the better. The client program can always turn the
> simple output into something fancier (like MathML or LaTeX), but it's
> hard the other way around.
>
> Thanks so much for discussing this!
>
> - Gerd.
>
>