[Axiom-developer] RE: SymPy on Axiom Wiki

[Bill Page]

On March 31, 2007 8:52 AM Ondrej Certik
> 
> I created another example in the Sandbox to show how to
> compute a limit in SymPy, as this is probably the only
> feature of SymPy that can be interesting, from the
> algorithms point of view.

Well actually I think SymPy might be interesting to Axiom
developers specifically because Axiom does not currently
have a purely symbolic domain, i.e. a domain where one can
do just symbolic manipulations without regard to what
mathematical object an expression might represent. Of that
is not quite true because underlying Axiom is Lisp and
Lisp SExpression is available as a domain. And there is
the InputForm domain to which almost all Axiom objects can
be coerced. Right now InputForm looks and behaves very much
like SExpression but the OutputForm that corresponds to both
of these domains is much too Lisp-ish for my taste. I think
it would be much better if the coercion to OutputForm from
InputForm looked more (or even exactly) like the syntax of
input to the Axiom interpreter. Then we could add symbolic
manipulations such as are done in SymPy directly to Axiom.
In fact this would be very easy to do and the fact that it
has not yet been done in Axiom can only related to the
pre-occupation of the original Axiom developers with what
Stephen Watt calls "computer algebra" as opposed to the
much simpler problem of symbolic computation. But I think
symbolic computation has an important place in Axiom.

I would like to discuss this more with other active Axiom
developers.

> 
> Another easy way to play with SymPy is just to download it
> and start bin/isympy. No installation is needed, just a
> standard python interpreter.

Well I did have a bit of time installing the pygame dependency
since axiom-developer.org is not a Debian machine. The secondary
SDL dependencies of pygame where a small challenge but it was
not that hard.

Is 'isympy' based on IPython like Sage? (Sorry, I have read all
the SymPy docs yet). 

> 
> If anyone of you plays with it, I am very interested in your
> opinions (interface, features, etc.).
>

I plan to do some direct comparisons between Axiom's Factor
domain and SymPy factor in the near future so I am likely to
have comments. Would you like me to cross post them to the
SymPy list or is the axiom-developer list sufficient?

Regards,
Bill Page.
 
> 
> On 3/31/07, Bill Page <address@hidden> wrote:
> > ...
> > http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandBoxSymPy
> >