Helping out with Maxima



Richard Fateman wrote:
>
> If you assume SBCL, then you can use its foreign function interface
> http://www.sbcl.org/manual/Introduction-to-the-Foreign-Function-Interface.ht
ml#Introduction-to-the-Foreign-Function-Interface
> to directly link to FORTRAN.
>
> On the other hand, SBCL support for Windows, according to this page
> 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.
> 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...

Although i don't know anything about that, there is supposed to be a comman
foreign function interface working with Allegro, CMUCL, SBCL, ECL,
http://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/manual/cffi-manual.html
and swig has a module which can do the wrapping in an automated
wayhttp://http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Lisp.html#Lisp_nn11
It can also wrap for clisp, which covers Windows use, i think.


-- 
Michel Talon