struggling with minor issue on porting of maxima



On 2012-08-14, Richard Fateman <fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> except in the old-fashioned read-eval-print loop, the
> (maxima::continue) program does not catch errors like macsyma-quit or 
> to-maxima-repl.

The repl is launched via (CL-USER::RUN) (which eventually calls
MAXIMA::CONTINUE). 

> PS. Why no plot or front-end?

About plotting, I see that START-GNUPLOT-PROCESS in src/plot.lisp
doesn't have a case for Allegro. Pretty much all it has to do is
something like

  (setq *gnuplot-stream* (<function to launch program and redirect input>))

If you can tell us how to do that for Allegro, I'll be happy to put that
into src/plot.lisp.

About the front end, those (XMaxima and wxMaxima) can't be built (given
the existing machinery) from Lisp. Probably the easiest thing to do is
reuse the front end from a precompiled package; I would guess all you
have to do is tell the front end how to launch the back end. I don't
know how to do that.

Incidentally, about the help system, the maxima.info* files are packaged
in the tarball, so if you build from a tarball, you should be able to
use the help system. (There isn't a way to build the help system from
Lisp.)

best

Robert Dodier