[Texmacs-dev] Improving the Maxima interface

[Andrey G. Grozin]

Hello *,

I'm going to improve the TeXmacs-Maxima interface. The new maxima script
has --list-avail, which lists available Lisps and versions of Maxima. It
should be possible to start each of them. The following cases can occur:

1. There is no "maxima" in the $PATH

2. "maxima" in the $PATH is old (<=5.6), TeXmacs should call it using the
   old calling syntax

3. "maxima" in the $PATH is new (>=5.9), and maxima --list-avail gives a
   list of available versions/lisps. TeXmacs should be able to call each
   of them, with the new syntax.

I'm going to write a shell script which will be called from
init-texmacs.scm. Its aim is to find the case (1-3), and the list of
versions in the case 3.

How can I call this script from init-texmacs.scm and read its output to
scheme? I can manipulate the form of this output, say, using sed, and to
make it an S-expression, if this simplifies things.

Another, somewhat unrelated question. I was told by Maxima falks that
TeXmacs sets the environment variable MAXIMA_DIRECTORY to the empty
string (in the case of Maxima-5.9). This used to break some things like
plotting in Maxima-5.9-pre*; now they have added a special work-around.
But why does TeXmacs set this variable at all? Is it possible not to set
it? Its existence may break other things in maxima, like the command load,
by providing a wrong search path for loading maxima files. Maybe, recent
problems reported by the users of maxima-5.9 have this reason. It would be
much better not to set this variable, at least not to such a meaningless
value as the empty string.

Best regards,
Andrey