--- Vadim <vadim at vkonovalov.ru> wrote:
> After googling a little I found related FeynCalc opensource package
> for (commercial) Mathematica CAS, which solves similar tasks.
> Much interesting, there followed a discussion back in 2004 about
> implementing this in AXIOM and may be MAXIMA also, but seemingly not
> much done in this area.
>
> Are there non-technical problems to this? (license issues, etc)
> Is it possible for newcomer like me to eventually "translate"
> FeynCalc code to maxima? or to axiom?
In general, it probably is possible. I don't know all the requirements
of the Feyncalc package as far as algorithms go, so you might wind up
having to implement some of the supporting mathematical abilities as
well.
The primary difficulty is putting together what all the various parts
of Feyncalc are doing, figuring out how to do them in the other
systems, and then doing it. I don't know of any licensing issues that
would pose a problem.
FWIW, this is one of my long term interests for the Axiom project.
When I started looking into this, I wandered off into Units and
Dimensions support, Error Analysis issues, and from there into the
basic supporting technologies of Axiom (which is where I am now.) So I
have to crawl up past literate programming tools and typesetting to
understanding the SPAD/Aldor language, to Axiom's system design, to
implementing the basic physics foundations, to Feyncalc ;-). Even from
there, Feyncalc in Axiom would involve mapping the High Energy Physics
concepts into the strongly typed environment of Axiom - a fascinating
project but not to be underestimated. The advantage of this is
(potentially) an extremely robust and powerful system but the road is
long.
As for Maxima, that's actually likely to be somewhat simpler since
Maxima isn't strongly typed. If one wanted to undertake this project
my suggestion would be to identify the "core" parts of Feyncalc that
everything depends on, and see if similar functionality can be
implemented in Maxima. From there, build up. Check for Mathematica
specific abilities that Maxima doesn't have yet that Feyncalc needs.
For either case, one would need to scan the literature and collect as
test cases major uses of Feyncalc, to make sure moving it to a
different platform doesn't result in correctness problems.
Cheers,
CY
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