Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: SPAD and Aldor again

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

C Y <address@hidden> writes:

| Waldek Hebisch wrote:
| > Martin Rubey wrote:
| >> C Y <address@hidden> writes:
| >>
| >>> I think we should make the decision as a project not to wait any longer 
for
| >>> Aldor, and commit to improving SPAD - up until now I think there has been
| >>> hesitation to commit serious effort to SPAD due to the possibility of 
Aldor
| >>> becoming available and making such work unnecessary.  To my mind the first
| >>> step to improving SPAD is to decide what SPAD should be, since right now 
it
| >>> doesn't have a formal language definition.
| >> For me this is totally clear: SPAD should become a free implementation of 
the
| >> Aldor language. It would not make sense to have to different languages 
around.
| >>
| > 
| > I am affraid we will have two different languages: there are legal reasons
| 
| Indeed.  The Aldor documentation is not free at all, and any attempt to
| define Aldor in a literate style would have to duplicate Aldor without
| duplicating too closely its documentation - that's a real problem.

I cannot parse this. Could you elaborate?

| > and technical ones: I do not see why we should limit ourselfs to capabilites
| > present in Aldor and (assuming that we want this) implementing _all_
| > capabilities of Aldor is likely to take long time.  I do not want to
| > underestimate big things (dependent types) but getting little details
| > 100% compatible would probably take more time.
| 
| I don't know the full history of Aldor, but my impression is that it
| grew beyond just being "the language used to implement mathematics in
| Axiom" into a more general purpose language.  We need a language to
| implement mathematics in Axiom, so hopefully retaining that focus will
| make the task somewhat simpler.

You don't need a language to do *just* mathematics in Axiom.  You also
need a language to communicate with the world around.  All major
systems for computation mathematics have grown into that position.
Don't get blindsighted.

[...]

| I think that will be an important discussion to be had as a project -
| just how compatible with Aldor we want to stay.

Probably.  I would like to see a discussion about what is necessary to
support computational mathematics in Axiom, rather than how closely SPAD
should ressemble another language.

-- Gaby