On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 9:50 AM, Sheldon Newhouse <sen1 at math.msu.edu> wrote:
> It seems to me that you would have to translate your equations into a
> suitable input form for maxima, write them to a file and process them in the
> background using the batch form of maxima. In the batch program you would
> write solutions to disk and read them into your program. In the end, you
> would verify small amounts of data checks and string checks.
It turns out that a C program can call Maxima functions directly,
so it's not necessary to pass expressions back and forth as strings.
Most Lisp implementations have a so-called foreign function interface (FFI).
There have been attempts to build an FFI which works across
different Lisp implementations, e.g. CFFI. If I am not mistaken,
ECL has an implementation of CFFI, and also its own mechanism
for calling Lisp from C. The patches posted by Mike Hansen make
use of the latter, if I am not mistaken.
best
Robert Dodier