What do Axiom users want from a numerical package? Given that Axiom was
once "married" to the NAG library, I'd expect such things as basic
linear algebra, ordinary and partial differential equations, digital
signal processing, and statistics. R has all of these, but it is more --
it's a complete environment all by itself. And quite a lot of the wisdom
of R is embedded in contributed packages rather than in the base
environment.
R can function as a command line interpreter, a shared library (DLL on
Windows as well), a DCOM server on Windows, a CGI interpreter, and even
a web application server! There are lots of ways to quickly get some
kind of interface up, especially if you're willing to do "inelegant"
things like spawn a process, open up a command line interpreter and pipe
R language to it.
As an R programmer, I think what *I* would use most would be the ability
to use Axiom as a high-level language to generate R code, just like the
"ancient" CAS systems did with FORTRAN code. The R language is a lot
better than FORTRAN as a target language. And I don't have enough
experience with Axiom (or any other CAS except Derive) to know what
sorts of problems I could pose that I couldn't get solved in a timely
manner in Axiom alone, without a numerical "assistant" like R.
Looking at the other way around -- embedding a CAS in R -- of course, R
can spawn an Axiom process and pipe code to its standard input. I'm not
sure I'd take that approach, since R is capable of directly linking to
C, C++ and Fortran code. I'd be more inclined to take the Ginac symbolic
calculator library (written in C++) and just do a straighforward and
largely mechanical integration.
Pierre Doucy wrote:
Martin,
depending on what you actually want to do, you might just want to make
them talk to each other through, for instance, a pipe (and some
translation in between) that might do the trick if what you want to do
just needs basic types.
That might also be a good start to understand what are the constraints
and what needs to be done to actually embed axiom in R (or the other
way around).
Pierre
On 19 Dec 2005 15:58:34 +0100, Martin Rubey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear Ed,
in fact, a connection between R and Axiom would be wonderful and this was
already stated a few times.
I also do not really know which way to go, embed Axiom in R or embed R in
Axiom...
Do you have ideas?
Martin
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