Re: [Axiom-developer] B#

[root]

re: quote

nope. i agree with this rather insightful quote though: BOOT is toast. :-)

re: the future of aldor

there are some sticky IP issues with aldor. Manuel was a major
contributor and he is no longer able to agree to donate his code.
i'm in discussion with people associated with INRIA about making
his code and research available but that, like everything else,
moves at a (pre-global-warming) glacial pace.

re: aldor replacing spad

aldor may or may not replace spad. that's a huge task. and it will
be made worse because it's unlikely that any one of us will be willing
to perform a straight spad to aldor conversion without generating 
numerous opinions regarding "better ways to do this" (witness the
ongoing Monoid/Ring discussion).

even without that level of issue it's tempting to try to break the
algebra cycles using post-facto extensions. this will generate more
very interesting but, to the actual implementors, painful discussion.

re: B-natural

B-natural won't replace the interpreter because the real semantics of
an expression is carried in the type. B-natural has the essential goal
of hand-waving away the type issues to make it easier for people who
don't care about the type. but i believe this raises some very hard
coercion/conversion questions which will turn out to be fundamental.

we would probably get further faster by working out the exact 
coercion/conversion graph and formalizing the mechanism. then we could
make the interpreter smarter as well as extend it to special domains
(e.g. to interval arithmetic which does not preserve the distributive
property).

t