Looking for basic outline of how Maxima is put together
Subject: Looking for basic outline of how Maxima is put together
From: Robert Dodier
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:43:22 -0600
On 7/28/10, Steve Stevenson <steve at cs.clemson.edu> wrote:
> I'm new to Maxima but not CASs in general. I'm looking for an overview
> document of the control loop. I'm interested in interfacing Maxima through
> another route so I'd like to pass sexprs back and forth.
The top-level read-eval-print loop is not too complicated
but there are many messy details, which are mostly not
well documented. Can you please explain what your goal
is here. Also, you might take a look at the projects listed
on this page: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/relatedprojects.html
Many of those involve somehow connecting Maxima to another
program (typically through a socket).
Aside from reading and writing a socket, it is possible to
call Maxima functions directly, either from a Lisp program
which you've written (e.g. to replace the top-level repl),
or from a C program (depends on Lisp implementation),
or a Java program (if Maxima is compiled w/ ABCL, a CL
for the JVM).
There are a lot of possibilities and I 'd be glad to help you
sort it out, if you can tell us more about how you would
like things to work.
Robert Dodier