[sage-devel] Fwd: Computer algebra system? / SAGE and Pipes

On 5/12/07, William Stein <wstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 2. Maxima sometimes runs out of memory, or goes into a loop.  Interrupting
> > it from the keyboard may or may not be possible (depends on the Lisp,
> > probably).
>
> This is certainly an issue.  SAGE is better at this than you might
> think, though, at least as of SAGE-2.5.  It will even automatically kill
> and restart a bad maxima process if necessary, after it tries sending
> control-C's for a certain specified amount of time.

Something that might be relevant here. There is a bit of
code to implement a conventional Unix-style server to launch
simultaneous independent Maxima sessions. See:
http://maxima.cvs.sourceforge.net/maxima/maxima/share/contrib/maxima-server.lisp

> Maxima is slightly harder than most other participating programs, primarily
> because of Maxima's interactive question asking.   At some point we'll
> have to do something about that.  The design choice for Mathematica is
> they simply return all possible answers, e.g., for integrate(x^n, x), they
> would return the integral in two cases.

That is the right thing to do.

> SAGE will likely eventually do the same (via carefully though through
> interaction with Maxima).

OK, when you get around to that, please let me know.
Maxima's asksign and other question-asking mechanisms are
impossibly obnoxious. To me, quieting asksign is a major goal.

I made an attempt to work around asksign but it doesn't
work very well. I keep meaning to try again; pressure/help from
outsiders could be the motivation I need to get going.
See: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Noninteractive%20mode

Thanks for your interest in Maxima.

Robert Dodier