Page, Bill writes: > On Wednesday, September 21, 2005 8:52 AM Martin Rubey wrote: > >... > > Well, output is easily changed. > > Yes, you are right. As usual, I just wish we had more > documentation: both user documentation (how-to) and > conceptual documentation (why). > > Axiom's approach to output as a coercion to the type OutputForm is radically > different than any other computer algebra system that I know.
Yes. > There is an attempt also in Axiom to do the same with input (InputForm and > SExpressions etc.) I think that this attempt is doomed to fail. Still it may be useful, at least for debugging. > Understanding how to use types and domains in Axiom is both "90% of the > problem" and "90% of the reasons why one might want to use Axiom in the > first place". We need to write more about this ... No. There is enough written about it (in the Aldor User Guide). A short introductory text is in the Axiom book. > But I think there is much more to this concept and that the current Aldor > and SPAD syntax does not sufficiently highlight the important place that it > holds. The current syntax, i.e. 'rep' and 'per' as macros and 'Rep' as a > distinquished name for a local domain, seems to treat representation on a > par with other programming constructs. And this is a good thing, it seems to me. > I just spent a couple of hours trying to add a new operation called 'terms' > to the DistributedExpression domain. The idea was that it should return a > List of Expressions in analogy with the 'monomials' operator of POLY, but I > kept getting hung up on vague SPAD compiler messages and picky details for > explicitly specifying domains... After all this time I still do not feel > fluent in SPAD/Aldor but for some reason I continue to admire it greatly > when I see something that works! :) If you send me your code and the error message you got (the latter for cross-checking), I'll try to help. > Yes, I do agree that "cosmetics" is useful. In fact I have been know to > claim that "notation is (almost) everything" in mathematics > ... NO, NO, NO. Good notation is important, and I'd agree if you'd say that mathematics builds on good notation. But it's not nearly "almost everything". What (good) notation provides is a means to make your ideas and proofs clear and enable others to follow them. The idea comes before the notation. Often even the proof comes before the notation. Martin _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
