building dll from maxima to be called by Excel VBA

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 04:43:27PM +0100, Fran?ois Hillion wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have developped a small numerical model with Mathcad for the ease of 
> upgrading and debugging. The model has now to run numerous calculations, 
> which are always very tedious to trigger by-hand. My idea was to feed 
> the model and get back results through Excel.

Why excel? is it because the data to feed in is already available in
excel? is it because you have an existing excel sheet that needs this
kind of calculation?

I find that Excel has a super-quadratic annoyance curve... Initially
when you want to do very simple things, there is no annoyance, but as
you get progressively more demanding, annoyance rises rapidly.

With something like maxima, the opposite is true. When you want to do
something simple, like add a list of numbers, the annoyance is
somewhat high (to make the calculation repeatable you have to open a
text file, type the numbers into a list, tell maxima to calculate the
sum, load the text file from maxima, convert the answer to floating
point...)

But as you start to become more demanding, maxima has more of a
logarithmic annoyance level... by the time you're wanting to do long
derivations of ODEs from differential principles of physics, you're
very happy to have maxima and Excel would be completely useless.

Perhaps you can describe your numerical process in general terms, and
we can tell you whether this would be easy from entirely within
maxima.

Welding maxima, or anything, to Excel sounds like a very steep
annoyance curve.


-- 
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan