I don't know about best, but if reading/writing tab delimited fields is
all you need to communicate with Excel, then that should not be difficult.
A more elaborate connection between Excel and Lisp (and hence Maxima)
is described in a paper of mine, which allows you to insert
Lisp (and hence Maxima) functions that operate on elements or ranges in
an Excel spreadsheet. The details for defining the Maxima functions
would have to be worked out, and also you would have to be using a
Maxima compiled into a Lisp that supported foreign function calls to
OLE or to Visual Basic.
RJF
Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 3/25/09, Hassan Mohamed <hassan_hany_fahmy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>> what is the best way for maxima to connects to a Data Base(any !)
>>
>
> Well, there is at least one Common Lisp library, CL-SQL.
> I don't know anything about it. There are probably other SQL libraries.
> As to databases, I've worked with MySQL and it seems straightforward.
> PostgreSQL is sometimes recommended over MySQL.
> I've never used it.
>
> Maxima doesn't have any built-in database functions.
> You could launch Maxima, then load the SQL library.
> You might need to write some glue code to translate Maxima
> objects into stuff the database wants to see. I haven't tried it.
>
>
>> or read and w to a spread sheet?
>>
>
> Well, I guess that would probably mean Excel, and therefore
> struggling with Microsoft's data transfer mechanism ...
> My advice is avoid it --- try working with SQL instead.
>
> Hope this helps!
>
> Robert Dodier
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