On 12/31/08, ?iga Lenar?i? <ziga.lenarcic at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) What is the current naming convenction for new functions in Maxima?
> It seems that new functions are named in a
> whole_words_separated_with_underscore.
Yes.
> I personally much prefer the Mathematica's CapitalsForEachWord,
Adopting that convention would be a serious mistake,
and I discourage it at every opportunity.
> 4) Will there be possibility to call compiled numerical libraries
> (ATLAS ..) from lisp in the future?
I hope so. The key part is a foreign function interface which is
usable by enough of the important-enough Lisp implementations.
I believe that CFFI is the most likely candidate at this point.
> 5) List of lists vs matrix : transpose does not work on list of
> lists, therefore one has to convert list of lists to matrix,
> transpose and convert back. I don't see what functionality is gained
> by reprezenting matrices with a 'matrix.
Confounding lists and matrices (and sets) is a serious mistake.
> 6) There is no real SVD in Maxima? (don't suggest lapack dgesvd)
Here I'll try to avoid saying something I'll regret later.
> 6) What functionality should Maxima provide regarding function fitting?
> I intend to write functions with similar calling structure as
> Mathematicas
> Fit - linear fitting (via missing SVD)
> FindFit - nonlinear fitting via levenberg-marq. minimisation (from
> Numerical Recipes)
The numerical stuff in the lsquares package makes use of LBFGS,
a quasi-Newton algorithm. L-M or other Gauss-Newton algorithms
might be preferable for least-squares problems, but I don't think it
makes a big difference.
One thing that comes to mind to make it simpler for the user is to
implement a construct similar to the "data frame" of S+ and R,
which associates metadata such as column names with a matrix.
By the way, the tone of your messages really discourages cooperation.
FWIW
Robert Dodier