Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: A modest proposal

[Stephen Wilson]

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:
> I very strongly disagree. I do not think the AXIOM project should be
> in the business of building literate programming tools. And I am
> rather surprised that Stephen should think so since he is also against
> the idea of building and maintaining intermediate tools like BOOT that
> are much more intimately related to AXIOM than literate programming
> tools.

Ok, no problem.  Besides, Axiom is not in the business of doing
anything.  It is the sum total of the efforts and skill of the
individual contributors.  If I have a problem which I need a tool to
solve, and if no one else is already pursuing a solution, Ill create
it myself. 

It just so happens that Boot doesn't solve anything for me.  But thats
another, completely unrelated, issue.

> I think one of the great advantages of open source is the ability to
> build freely on the work of other open source projects. Tim had the
> right idea (but the wrong tool) when he decided to use noweb for
> literate programming in Axiom. Re-writing such things in Lisp is just
> a diversion away from the real point of the Axiom project (at least
> what the Axiom project should be). 

No one, to my knowledge, is rewriting noweb or some equivalent in Lisp.

> I cannot imagine that spending time extending asdf to understand
> pamphlet format will be anything but a similar diversion. The result
> of all this effort is just to build a bigger ghetto in which Axiom
> will eventually die... :-(

Not sure what to say about that.  There are technical reasons why asdf
is a reasonable direction to pursue.  I have no idea what you mean by
`ghetto'.


Sincerely,
Steve