[sage-devel] presentation about Maxima at Sage developer days

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ondrej.certik at gmail.com 
> 
> Well, but someone had to write the pprint function, no?

Yes, but it doesn't make sense to me to write a tree printing function as
part of the limit calculation.
What does that say about python symbolics?
.... snip....

> >
> > which in lisp would be, I think..
> >
> > (if (numberp e)(signum e)(signum (evalf e))
> 
> Well, but the above Python code is for the function signum, so in
> LISP, someone had to write that code too.


Again, why would signum be part of limit??
.....

> 
> Right. One can look at the overall style of lisp and python though.

The lisp program was written over 30 years ago, as part of Paul Wang's PhD
thesis. It was probably not intended to be held up as an example of readable
programming..

  A modern lisp program would probably be easier to read, at least if it
were written with the intention of being readable.
Examples are in the books by Norvig, or Graham.  

If you find python easier to write and read, I understand that you can use
python, and translate it to Common Lisp with clpython.
Then you can compile it.   I have not used this program, so I cannot say how
good it is.


RJF