On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:21:50AM -0700, Richard Fateman wrote:
> I've been playing with octave a bit (octave is essentially a free clone of
> matlab), after not using Matlab for 15 years or more.
> Why might it interesting to hook up to maxima?
>
> 1. Many people know and love Matlab (maybe Octave too). Its conventions,
> while crummy from a technical programming language perspective -- bad scope
> rules, no real packages, and a terrible convention that redefines an array A
> as a function if there is a file named A.m in accessible directories --
> making compilation very iffy...
>
> yet it has fostered many applications: many people contributing useful
> programs. Octave comes with (free) code tuned on a per-cpu basis. (e.g.
> when I installed Octave, it knew I had a Pentium D and loaded appropriate
> assembler). For some people it might be nice to know that someone who really
> cares about Lapack, parallel Lapack, etc, is on the job, rather than hoping
> the Fortran-to-Lisp stuff is working, and up to the latest revision, etc.
> There are also packages for gnuplot as well as a java plotting program.
>
> 2. Its programming tool are sometimes neat and/or bizarre. To reverse a
> vector V of n items, instead of doing
> reverse(V), one does something like V([n:-1:1]). Things like this can be
> added to Maxima, and maybe that should be revisited.
>
> 3. Maxima could provide the same utility for Octave as Maple does for
> Matlab; this is, I think, of only slight interest to people who know how to
> use Maxima. It could pique interest in CAS among of the (much larger, I
> think) community of Octave users. Octave/Matlab is, (I think) rather widely
> used in courses, and having a free symbolic toolkit for Octave would
> introduce those students to a few features of a CAS.
>
> 4. What else could be done? Well it would be really neat if one could have
> Octave++ where all the numerics were done in arbitrary precision. For now,
> even the Lapack subset is probably not up for that, much less stuff like
> numerical quadrature. Some of this could probably be taken from MPFR if
> someone cared. (Any MPFR experts who read this mailing list?)
>
> Now if we could get some Octave enthusiast to pick this up, instead of
> diverting a Maxima expert, that would be even better.
>
> RJF
I'm just starting with Maxima. What is the best way to learn about how
to add features to Maxima?
Thanks,
Dave Feustel