--- Ralf Hemmecke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Axiom, in its current state, is much more for programmers and > > developers than for end users. An Emacs inteface which helps those > > people seems like a logical step at this time. > > Hmmm, at first I thought you are right. But what does it mean to > have an axiom interface for developers? If you develop a package you > write some Aldor (instead of SPAD) code. The only thing you would > need is a support to load your package into axiom. But that is > nothing. If you work with Axiom you are a user.
True, in a way. I guess I was thinking "working for the sake of creating a good CAS" vs. "working to use the CAS to solve other problems". That's still fuzzy though - for mathematical research work they might be the same thing! Anyway, Emacs seems a popular tool for the "working for the sake of a a better CAS" crowd (which is what we are at this time). > > An "official" GUI, of sufficient quality to be worthy of the > > Axiom project, is EXTREMELY non-trivial. > > That should become part of the WishList and after a while it should > develop into a project description where somebody could start to work > on it. Right. > Well, one thing I would start with is a description of what features > we would like that GUI to have. The implementation or what > tools/languages is then used to implement it is a completely > different issue. And maybe after we have a proper problem description, > we should contact open source developers that are knowledgable in GUI > building in order to implement our whishes. I think, just saying "we > need a 'nice' GUI" is not enough. We could talk forever. True. OK, if we want to be more specific, a while back I outlined a few ideas for a CAS GUI here, and a couple more were added: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/CY%27s%20conceptual%20stuff (was thinking Maxima, but works for any CAS) I have some of that stuffed into my portal site somewhere - I should spruce it up and put it in the WIKI. Obviously those are just a few drops in an ocean, but it's something. > It seems that you are one of the people with much interest in GUI. > Start a Wiki and try to collect opinions, wishes, ideas, links to > relevant papers. That all should finally become a problem description. Sounds like a plan. I'll see what I can do. I have a couple papers on plotting issues and techniques, besides the GUI design thesis - I think there might be a bib file out there somewhere we could use as a reference too. I'll need to dig that out of my archives. Pity there are no academic programs where this kind of thing could get funded. (In the US anyway.) > Yes, we need something like that also for other subprojects. > > Kai Kaminski made a kind of project description on the wiki before he > started. > > http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/AxiomUI > > We should have this for any subproject, together with a list of all > these subprojects. How many are there? GUI, maybe the units stuff once I get it out of hibernation, web based interfaces, JET code for differential equations, others? > > Also, before we do a GUI we would probably need to bring B-natural > > or something like it to maturity. > > Well, I think a prerequisite of this is that Aldor gets support for > reflections. And a prerequisite of that is that the aldor compiler > becomes open source or at least that there is a developer at > aldor.org who implements reflections. Right. Still, I suppose that need not stop the collection of ideas. Cheers, CY __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
