generating C or Java, was: Why is *print-circle* set to T by default? WAS: grinding, etc.



Robert Dodier wrote:


> 
> But, um, if it solves the problem immediately, then it solves the problem
> ... in what sense is it lacking?
> 

It is not lacking at all, it is in fact so direct and simple that it should 
indeed be integrated in maxima, because a command to output C code should be 
appreciated by many people. Anyways i thank you very much, Robert, and i 
also thank Stavros Macrakis for his (quite sophisticated for me) solution to 
the same problem, and prof. Richard Fateman for his alternative route to the 
solution. This, combined with fortra.lisp, f90.lisp, shows that there are
"many ways to skin a cat"


I have read some of Fateman's papers on multiprecision computations with
lisp and co. so i see that it is one of his subjects of interest. By the 
way, for reference, here are the URLS for the necessary software he is 
speaking about:

http://www.mpfr.org/ 
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/generic/mpfr.lisp                                        
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/generic/ga.lisp                  

>From my experience speaking with colleagues, there is very little hope 
people in the physics community  may be attracted by lisp programming, if 
only because the language is far too gigantic, nobody wants to learn several 
hundred pages (*) of stuff. Python has gained a lot of momentum in the same 
community because you learn it very fast, still it is not that different 
from lisp. All this to say that the solution he advocates may have practical
use probably only if combined with a wrapper which hides it behind simple 
maxima commands. (*) same punishment for C++, but more generally, as 
coauthor of a big book on my subject, i know that big books are always a 
failure, nobody reads them, and it is even difficult to find information
inside - either the index is too small and lacks half the interesting words, 
or too big, the relevant page is hidden among myriads irrelevant ones.

-- 
Michel Talon