Dear Bill, unfortunately, I have too little time to answer everything... Especially some of #1 to #6 need more thinking before I answer.
Bill Page writes: > Could you explain what you mean by "statically typed"? I don't think Aldor > and Spad could be said to be statically typed either. I agree that in > contrast to Aldor and Spad, Mupad is not "strongly typed". And this is > exactly my point. Hm, I thought that static typing means that the type of a variable is known at compile time, which is clearly the case in Aldor/Spad but not necessarily in the Axiom interpreter. As far as I know, it is not the case at all in MuPad. I don't really know what strongly typed would mean. According to wikipedia, it's meaning depends on the person using it :-) > The "type hierarchy" in MuPad was more or less directly grafted on to MuPad > in version 2. Version 1 of MuPad looked almost identical to Maple release 4 > and had essentially no concept of type at all. But the structure of these > programming languages have diverged greatly in MuPad versions 2 and 3 and > Maple from versions 7, 8, 9 and 10. Maple by deliberate design has no > concept of type at all (the "assume" facility notwithstanding). Both MuPad > and Maple are taking very different paths towards a more complete "object- > orientation", and neither are really similar to Axiom. I find current MuPad quite similar to Axiom. There are domains, categories and similar stuff, but it seems that Axiom handles this things a lot stricter than MuPad. > >> In a sense, Axiom is/was an experiment in the application of strongly > >> typed programming languages in computer algebra and to be quite honest > >> and blunt, for the most part the experiment seems to have failed. :( > > > > No, most of it has been transformed into MuPad. > > I disagree. In spite of what MuPad has borrowed from Axiom, it seems to me > that so far MuPad has implemented only a small part of the original concept > of the Axiom designers. Well, I admit that I don't know MuPad well enough to judge. In any case, I'm only talking about the design, not the amount of stuff actually implemented... Martin _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
