On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 6:39 AM, Richard Fateman
<fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu>wrote:
>
> On the other hand, SBCL support for Windows, according to this page
> http://www.sbcl.org/platform-**table.html<http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html>;
> is "port in progress" so it appears SBCL is not supported on the
> operating system
> used by the vast majority of Maxima users.
>
I would choose ccl. It's fully supported (with commercial support if
that's important to you) on Windows and Linux and Mac OS X. That probably
covers 99 and 44/100% of the users. (Yes, I made that up.)
Another possibility is to examine UFFI to see if that can be used with most
> of the common lisps.
> There may be some objection from some people to the idea of having FORTRAN
> code compiled into
> binary somehow included in Maxima. I think it is worth it, not to deny
> the possibility of difficulties regarding
> which FORTRAN compiler etc etc. I dislike the idea of relying on awk,
> perl, make ... all of whose functions should be done in Common Lisp...
I don't know of any lisp that would allow you to add foreign code directly
into the binary. Most will support loading of libraries, though.
Getting all of the right compiler options to the Fortran compiler can be
fairly difficult. At least autoconf and friends have done the dirty work
of figuring that out so you don't have to do the same thing yourself in
Lisp. Yes, you can refuse to support other compilers, but even different
versions of the same compiler have different options.
(I, for one, like choice. If you want only implementation, please be sure
that you make everyone drive exactly the same car first.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> On the same theme, all these fortran programs are very old and assume that
>> "double precision" is the ultimate end of scientific computation
>> precision.
>> However in many computations nowadays, double precision is dramatically
>> insufficient. Fortunately maxima has "big floats" so that computations
>> entirely done in maxima can bypass the precision problems. But this rules
>> away
>> all the converted fortran code.
>>
> Not all. Some code should work fine.
>
>
Indeed. Sometime back I wrote a little script to go and massage the lapack
(f2cl) code to support bigfloat arithmetic instead of doubles. I think I
did one quick test computing the eigenvalues. It worked.
And if you're whining about how slow the f2cl code is, be sure to whine
even louder. :-) (That's the generic "you".)
I think we have to remember that maxima is about symbolic computations. If
you're just crunching numbers, you should probably be using something else,
with, maybe, some kind of IPC to maxima.
>>
> I think we should have a place where suggested projects are collected. Is
> this something for the Maxima wiki?
>
If not, there should be.
Ray