Hunter Monroe wrote:
> John,
>
> Please let me know if you can share the lisp files for Maxima compatibility
> with Mathematica.
>
> If anyone wants to try out Mockmma please free to check out the sourceforge
> project and share your experience. Soon I will be posting a few tweaks to
> wxMaxima that will let you see the Mathematica-style command line.
>
> Would "Maximatica" be a better name than "Mockmma"?
>
> Hunter
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Lapeyre [mailto:pdl at johnlapeyre.com]
> Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 3:02 PM
> To: Hunter Monroe; maxima at math.utexas.edu
> Subject: Re: Mockmma
>
>
>> Would you have any objection to me including your Mathematica
>> compatibility tools for maxima in a sourceforge project? This project
>> would develop a capability to translate Mathematica files into .mac
>> files and provide a Mathematica-style command line. This could also
>> build on Mockmma and work by Andrei Siver which has been discussed on
>> the maxima mailing list. A modest first objective might be to handle
>> the Combinatorica package created by Pemmaraju and Skiena (who hold
>>
> copyright).
>
> Yes, you are certainly welcome to use it. I suddenly got an opportunity for
> a new, more demanding, job and have not touched the project for some time.
>
> I think I only posted the perl version. In the meantime I put a lot of work
> into modifiying Richards' parser (mostly because I was learning lisp) to
> replace this perl, because it was so slow. I also began to recode many
> compatibility functions in lisp, because I had a difficult time getting the
> maxima language to behave like I wanted it to. My proof of concept goal was
> to take a real-world collection of routines and get the translator and
> compatibility functions to such a state that they could translate this
> particular collection. I actually made a good bit of progress to that end.
> However, as Richard pointed out, some of the most interesting and powerful
> features of Mma are very difficult or impossible to duplicate, so such a
> project has this large inherent limitation. But, I imagine there is a good
> bit of application code, like the example that I was working on, that does
> not used these interesting features.
>
> I can send some of these other things, if you are interested.
>
> thanks,
> John
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
Just a word of caution.
So far maxima is not threatening to other CAS systems and can function
just fine. I would be somewhat worried about lawsuits if names and
codes are very close to commercial CAS systems. This is especially true
in the US where the people who evaluate the validity of this or that
software don't have much expertise, and those with sufficient funds can
usually intimidate others.
For instance, the fairly trivial definitions used in Interval
arithmetic have been patented (in a completely unfair way). This has
caused more than a few implementers using Interval Analysis to keep
their software from being consipicuously made available.
A discussion related to these kinds of 'porting' issues took place on
this list some time ago in regard to ideas of porting algorithms in the
"Numerical Recipes" books to maxima--even though many of those
algorithms were not original to Numerical Recipes. They were simply
encoded in various high level languages and published in the Numerical
Recipes books.
Why not keep the Mockmma name for awhile to see how it goes?
-sen