Maxima and regex



   >From mailnull  Thu Jan 10 05:19:19 2013
   From: Sean <seany at uni-bonn.de>
   Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2013 06:18:59 +0100
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

   Hello all

   Thanks for the replies, yes unfortunately I need regex, 
   for analyzing some strings, in string form.

   I will play around with sregex package, btw, is there a 
   way for Maxima to call external scripts (say perl), and 
   get the output programetically, i.e. not by pipe symbol, 
   which one uses in the command line manual call?

Maxima has the nregex lisp package still built-in by default. Most
lisps give you access to a regex package, too:

-GCL offers a regex library similar to GNU Emacs (see gcl-si.info,
section 17.0.1);

-Likewise CLISP (http://www.clisp.org/impnotes/regexp.html#SEC5)

-there is clawk (https://github.com/sharplispers/clawk), an awk in lisp

-Finally, there is cl-ppcre, which attempts to be the common lisp
 implementation of perl compatible regular expressions. This will work
 pretty much out of the box with a Maxima built on sbcl, cmucl or
 clisp.

 A few years ago I worked on redoing the info system using cl-ppcre
 (lots of advantages), but 'real-life' and some stubborn lisps stopped
 me short of merging this work into the master branch. The code is
 currently sitting on my github page.

 Fwiw, and if memory serves me, the cl-ppcre code ran about 3 times
 faster than the perl code, at least with sbcl or cmucl.

Leo