some editing tools for maxima /Grumpy old man..


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jaime E. Villate [mailto:villate at fe.up.pt]
> Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 9:26 AM
> Make and Perl are needed to build Maxima. Users who get pre-built
> packages do not need them.

Actually, I have built maxima 5.10 on windows (and I expect I can do so
again on solaris) without make or perl, just defsystem and the appropriate
files, and using a lisp system (Allegro) which is only slightly supported by
the sourceforge files.  Arguably those "appropriate files" could be produced
via make,  but they aren't.  Problem: I don't know enough about gnuplot etc
to make them or link them in to the allegro lisp.

Writing a plotting routine entirely in Lisp is easily possible if you are
first allowed to choose a particular lisp and a particular operating system.
There is no standardization of the graphics interface. Thus from Allegro I
can use "rdnzl" and .net on windows.  Or "common graphics" or "GTK". But the
code I write may not run on other systems. So the problem is, in some sense,
not the writing of code in lisp, but the requirements of portability to all
possible lisps.  While I try to write standard code when possible, I don't
find the task of testing on N lisps personally fulfilling :)

I am all in favor pre-built simple-to-download installers for xmaxima and
wxmaxima etc. Without them, I suspect the maxima user community would be 2
orders of magnitude smaller.

Thanks

RJF

 


> 
> emacs, wxmaxima and xmaxima can be viewed as 3 alternate interfaces for
> Maxima, but xmaxima has also another task: if you want to plot graphs,
> I do not think we have a lisp-only alternative at this point. You
> either install gnuplot, or xmaxima. And there are some plots (plotdf)
> that cannot be made with gnuplot. That's what keeps me working on
> Xmaxima.
> 
> Regards,
> Jaime
>