Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: noweb / Lisp Skills

[Martin Rubey]

Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> writes:

> Martin has a very good summary.  Many reserachers and potential
> contributors out there are not interested in learning Lisp just to be
> able to use Axiom, which already requires its own language.  That make
> the number of people capable to maintaining and evoling the
> interperter already very small.

Well, in fact I believe that the sets of people doing maths with Axiom and
people hacking the compiler or interpreter will be nearly disjoint.

> Lisp has been out for over half a century.  It did not take over the
> world.  I don't know why; but that is food for thought.

I think that lisp is a wonderful language and I think that it *might* be worth
the effort to reimplement Aldor in Lisp. But the reason for this is entirely
different from reimplementing a comparatively simple tool like noweb. Having an
Aldor interpreter in Lisp would be certainly a very sensible thing.
 
> | Things to do on the interpreter side needed for the axiom-combinat project:
> | 
> | * make it understand Aldor:
> | 
> |   * dependent types
> 
> Does not Axiom already user dependent type?  Do you have something
> specific in mind?

not completely:

f: (n: Integer) -> PrimeField n

is OK for Aldor, but not for SPAD. This is the reason for series returning the
ANY Type, for example.

Martin