[Axiom-developer] Re: axiom--book--1--patch-9 fails to compile

[Bertfried Fauser]

On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, root wrote:

> You don't have to build all of Axiom. You just need the code for
> extracting the book.tex from the book.pamphlet file. Thus, you
> should be able to do:
>
> cd axiom
> make start                 <=== this makes the document command
> cd src/doc
> document book              <=== this extracts book.tex then latex book.tex

OK, this worked out. It gave a warning "no root <<*>> defined" or such but
actually TeXed the book.
        "> make" did even produce an AXIOM, just for curiosity I tried it
and it came up with build date March 2 2004, so its new. It computes, but
I don't know what is broken. It compiled for several hours (PIII 700MHz)
without problems, but I had to leave at 11pm the institute, which is
required for security reasons (@#$%#$#!!), so I cannot tell when it failed.

Q1:     If I would like to make changes to the book, how to proceed,
change it locally and send you a diff or writing a file which explains
what to change (work for you, most likely bad)
Q2:     Is there a policy for the TeX? I saw very very outdated TeX
commands like \root{x}\of{y} and \over and such things which seriously
interfere with newer TeX and LaTeX standards. Should there be \mathbb
fonts for real, complex numbers etc.

Q3:     Main question, is it possible to pipe files through axiom, so that
is reads from a file and writes its (TeX) output into a file? Maple has eg
a switch -l which allows to process files and maple interprets only code
inbetween special \begin{mapleinput}...\\end{mapleoutput} tags. It would
be really exquisite to have such a facility and to use AXIOM to produce
(most of) the book itself. This would reduce the possibility to make
errors in copying axiom output into the TeX file and would guarantee, that
in the book exactly that is displayed what AXIOM actually does. If AXIOM
only can process files, a perl frontend could do the rest, I would
recomment three possible environments

1)  \AXIOMsilent{command}
2)  \AXIOMoutputonly{command}
2)  \AXIOM{command}
[of course this can/should be done as \begin...\end environment]

The fist should issue an AXIOM command and ignore in the TeX file the
output (so that internal things can be done and the TeX file keeps
clean, eg:
        \AXIOMsilent{)set time on}

The second should issue an AXIOM command that is not recorded in the TeX
file, but the output is shown, this hides AXIOMs technicalities away from
the user, eg:
        \AXIOMoutput{draw(...)} or \AXIOMoutput{integrate(sin,x)}

The third tag should come up with the TeX output of the AXIOM command and
the corresponding AXIOM output for regular use and to be able to show the
reader what input caused the display to be shown.

         Let me say, that you did an enormous work already right now to
make the book available in its present form. Great!

ciao
BF.

% |   | PD Dr Bertfried Fauser    Fachbereich Physik    Fach M 678  |
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