Subject: Accessing maxima from the R statistical program
From: Søren Højsgaard
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:54:24 +0100
Dear Maxima-users/developers/...
I am writing to the list in the hope that I can get some people from the Maxima-community interested making computer algebra facilities available in the R statistical program, see www.R-project.org.
R is a quite succesful open source statistical program which has existed for about 15 years. There are a lot of activities around R; more than 1000 add-on packages; very active mailing lists; a newsletter; conferences etc.
A group of people involved in the R-project have looked into the possibilities of making computer algebra available in R. In this connection we have created an add-on package called "Ryacas" which provides an interface to the yacas computer algebra program. The group around yacas is unfortunately quite small and updates are infrequent. This has caused us to look towards the maxima system. While Ryacas may not have a long lifetime, some of the good things that have come out of the project are that we have a substantial amount of R code and also that we have a team in place.
We are therefore interested in knowing of people from the maxima-world who would be interested in joining such a team. (We are certainly also interested in knowing your views on the whole idea!) We do not envision making maxima a part of R. Specifically what we need is a way of accessing maxima programatically from within R. In the Ryacas package this is done by communicating with yacas via telnet to a specific port. Perhaps maxima could (easily?) be made so that this would also be possible for maxima? Perhaps (even better) it would be possible to write some api-functions via which maxima can be accessed? There are probably a number of other ways of doing this which I don't even know of...
If anyone finds this interesting, please do not hestitate to reply to me (sorenh at agrsci.dk) and to Gabor Grothendieck (ggrothedieck at gmail.dk).
Best regards
S?ren H?jsgaard