On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Waldek Hebisch wrote: > Bill Page wrote: > > Well, FriCAS is open source and you are supposed to look at > anything. But in closed source setting documenting something > is an implicit promise of support/handholding. Not documenting > something means that support people instead of explaining > can tell you "this is unsupported", which probably save them > a lot of time (and company save money)... >
I have never thought about "not documenting" as a way of saving money but I can say from long experience that commercial support for software isn't worth much at all - certainly not the many thousands of dollars that the people for whom I work pay to the software vendors each year. I suppose the money saved one way just ends up getting spent another way by hiring people like me. So I guess I should be happy about that ... ;) >> >> > Note that this is consistent with .input files, which >> >> > are also compiled by default. >> >> > >> >> >> >> In what sense are .input files compiled? >> > >> > .input files are first translated to Lisp (unless something >> > stops type inference) and then by default Lisp is compiled. >> > >> >> This seems strange to me since I usually think of .input files as >> "script" which is interpreted. I suppose that this use of the word >> "compiled" is a rather technical in relation to Lisp. >> > > At least with sbcl the .input "script" gets compiled down to > machine code. I am not sure what the "rather technical" above > means: compilation is a technical detail, but when using sbcl > compilation has quite clear meaning. > Yes, compilation of generated Lisp code is quite clear. My point was that I tend to use )read xxx.input as if 'xxx.input' was a series of commands to the FriCAS interpreter (i.e. "script"). But I should have realized that this is not really true since the language accepted by )read is not identical to the language accepted during interactive input to the interpreter. In particular the input to )read can use pile notation when writing functions and I do take advantage of that all the time. I just was not aware that )read also accepted BOOT syntax and I just could not imagine why anyone would want to hide that feature. Regards, Bill Page. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en.
