A.J. Rossini wrote:
> On Jan 15, 2008 8:40 PM, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> There is one excellent reason to write code within Maxima (either in
>> the Maxima language or in Lisp): to take advantage of Maxima's unique
>> core functionality, namely symbolic mathematics.
>>
>> Then there are some less good reasons.
>>
>> There is the convenience of coding arbitrary-precision (bigfloat) and
>> rational arithmetic in Maxima, where the syntax is identical to that
>> of integers/floats. (Though some other languages support operator
>> overloading, e.g. C++.)
>>
>> There is the ease of interfacing to other Maxima and Lisp code. But it
>> is a great pity that it is not easier to interface to outside packages
>> in all our underlying Lisps (though I understand there has been
>> progress). Recoding things in Maxima/Lisp is a waste of time and
>> effort.
>>
>> That said, even when the foreign function interfaces become available
>> on all platforms, and are reliable and easy to use, there is still the
>> issue of writing clean interfaces to their data types and functions.
>> For instance, R has a sophisticated system of data frames which it
>> would be nice to expose to the Maxima user but which corresponds to
>> nothing standard in Maxima. Even if R did the heavy lifting, we'd
>> still need Maxima-side routines for manipulating data frames in a
>> natural way.
>>
>
>
> Which reminds me to ask -- where do I look to see how to integrate
> Common Lisp packages with Maxima? Is there any docs on it? The
> first page of google hits were not relevant...
>
>
How do you want to integrate it? You'll probably get better answers if
you have a simple concrete example.
Ray