Robert Dodier wrote:
> Since there are already various workable user interfaces for Maxima,
> what I think would be even more interesting would be to equip some
> graphical program with Maxima as a computational engine.
> That is, there would be a GUI and there would be Maxima, but the
> program is not mostly about providing a GUI for Maxima,
> but rather that there is some problem domain and Maxima is an
> incidental part of the solution.
>
> Examples could be: a spreadsheet equipped with symbolic
> capabilities;
see
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/excel-lisp.pdf
But other than "it seems like a neat thing we can do" I could not find a
driving application for it.
> statistical analysis; process control; quantitative
> financial analysis; mechanical design; risk analysis.
>
Mostly these programs seem really happy with numeric-only data. in CAD
design, IBDE, ICON. google for more..
One system used Mathematica a little, but they figured they needed only
a tiny bit of symbolic math so they did it themselves,
last I heard: MODELICA.
Note that the Mathematica people would like to take all such
applications and implement them with Mathematica at the center, not as
an incidental part of the solution. If you think that your language
design is the best of all possible language designs, this is reasonable,
I suppose.
> Probably there are changes in Maxima which could help such applications.
> E.g. relaxing the "user in front of the console" assumption.
>
But there is a user in front of the system, some system, most of the
time.
Even though you keep on hoping for it, I doubt that one could make
Maxima into a "100% batch" system without considerably decreasing its
power :)
> As for myself, I like to have a command line,
me too.
RJF