Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom tutorial by Bill

[Bertfried Fauser]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:

Dear Joris!

thank you for your reply. Indeed I didn't intend to argue against TeXmacs.
I am just puzzeled during my attempot to get it running correctly with
AXIOM, ....

> > TeXmacs is not giving you the full control over the TeX code,
>
> Of course not: it is not a TeX front-end. But TeX is *VERY CLEARLY*
> an *OUTDATED* format for computer algebra, since it has *NO SEMANTICS*
> and not even a *RELIABLE PARSER*.

You are right. Nevertheless, as a scientist I can share most easily TeX
documents with colleagues. It sttill defacto standard. I see your ponts
and you are right.
        I could live however with a sort of TeX file where an active
environment takes some input and the math is set in TeX by the system. The
*control* which I would like to have, is to uses quite different TeX/LaTeX
classes, which we had eg distributed to authors of book chapters. If you
get these things back in totally different TeX flavours, its a nightmare.

        I will stick to TeXmacs, since it seems to be the obvious frontend
to AXIOM (beside the console) <grin>.

> I never tried Scientific Workplace, because I hate proprietary software.
> So please do not compare things which have nothing to do.

Once more OK, I had contact for the above given reason only. Indeed my
interest in AXIOM is partly (I like the strong typing very much too) to
get rid on the last prorietary softwar on my computer. Exactly the
ignorance ond troubles I had the last years with this proprietary softwas
(closed sorce, bugs which are never fixed, even if you send a solution...)
makes me fond of AXIOM and TeXmacs/AXIOM.

> When? Examples? I bet that the produced code will often be
> better than what you write by hand.

I would have to trace back my mails quite a bit to find these examples.
Its not the math I wanted to complain abaout, but the missing usage (of
teh TeXmac users by then) of journal/publisher requitred styles and
classes.

For own documents, this is not a problem, since one can copy and past the
output into another TeX file properly formatted. Perhaps TeXmacs is even
able to do it, but in my quest till now I wasn't able to do it.

Hope to get AXIOM/TeXmacs running on my SuSE box, will discuss it with a
local Linux guru too.

cheers
BF.

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