Re: [Axiom-developer] A possiible "navigation" approach for Axiom "crystal"

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings, and thanks for your very interesting suggestions!

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:

> Tim,
> 
> If you haven't yet looked at Python, then I very strongly
> recommend that you do. From the point of view of Axiom,
> Python looks (almost exactly!) like the Boot sub-language
> in which most of Axiom is written. I would even go so far
> as to suggest that it might be possible (even quite easy?)
> to port most of Axiom to Python. Doing so would have some
> very important advantages because of the extensive support
> that Python has for current computing environments.
> 

Just a few comments here -- disclaimer -- I've never used python
myself. 

To my understanding python is a great language, but I don't think it
would be a good idea to re-implement AXIOM in python.  The main
advantage of python is that it arguably has a larger pool of
knowledgeable users and developers than lisp does at this point.  This
is offset in my mind at least by the observations that 1) the language
is still a moving target 2) it is much slower/less efficient than lisp
in general, 3) a good deal of its popularity stems from the fact that
it has evolved the furthest towards lisp of the various popular
scripting languages -- it even has a 'lambda', 4) we have way too much
work to do as it is :-), 5) while quite portable, I am unaware of any
environment to which python could carry axiom to which gcl does not
already carry axiom, 6) lisp has a far longer history of real world
use, 7) it is unclear who will still be using python when the next hot
thing comes along or the development of the language ends, whereas
lisp appears to endure forever :-).

Just my $0.02.

Take care,


> Recently I also became aware of "LaTeXwiki"
> 
>   http://zwiki.org/LatexWiki
> 
>   http://mcelrath.org/Notes/LatexWiki
> 
> see also example at
> 
>   http://www.latexwiki.com
> 
> Taken together, I have the strong feeling that all of these
> "technologies" provide exactly the kind of long term (30 years?)
> development environment that is needed for Axiom and for large
> scale computer algebra systems in general.
> 
> Originally I had been very interested in mathematical document
> software with a computer algebra interface such as TeXmacs
> (http://www.texmacs.org). This might be a fairly good alternative
> to the old Axiom hypertex interface but this does not really
> address at all the larger issues that you raised in your email
> last December
> 
>  http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-12/msg00056.html
> 
> 
> I would be very interested to get reactions to this (what must
> seem rather radical) suggestion.
> 
> Regards,
> Bill Page.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 10:51 AM
> Subject: [GeneralDiscussion] TouchGraph ZWiki Navigator
> 
> 
> I'm currently trying to figure out a good way to package an applet I've
> cobbled together from the "TouchGraph":http://www.touchgraph.com/ app and
> some ZWiki, oython and HTML hacks.  If anybody's interested, I've published
> a working example on
> WikiLiver":http://zeck.floop.org.uk/mathis/WikiLiver/withNavigator and I'd
> really appreciate any ideas on how I could package it so that others can try
> it out on their ZWiki installations.
> --
> forwarded from
> http://zwiki.org/address@hidden
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Axiom-developer mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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