On Mon, 17 Mar 2014, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
As far as I know TeXmacs can embed FriCAS in its documents and when one
calls fricas from TeXmacs, then fricas outputs in texmacs format and
texmacs does the formatting.
TeXmacs can be used as a GUI front end for FriCAS, maxima, reduce, sympy,
sage, some othes CASs (Axiom, giac, macaulay2, cadabra, yacas, mathemagix,
pari, maple, Mathematica, MuPAD, maybe more), as well as to octave,
scilab, R, some plotting programs (asymptote, gnuplot) and others - the
full list is lengthy. You can open sessions to these CASs from TeXmacs
window. It provides high quality of typesetting mathematics (as high as
TeX/LaTeX, but interactively). Input for CASs also can be written in a
nice typeset 2D form (this requires some translation rules, say, how to
send integrals or sums to each CAS; such rule sets are, of course,
incomplete, and in many cases a user has to use syntax specific to a given
CAS, maybe intermixed with 2D mathematical notation). It is easy to
copy-paste, say, a matrix derived in a FriCAS session into an octave
session for further numerical work.
At the moment, TeXmacs is the best free GUI to mathematical programs. One
program should do one thing well; TeXmacs interactively typesets
mathematics very well. It seems a waste of time to develop separate (and
incompatible) GUI front ends for each CAS. Why not use TeXmacs as the main
GUI? Currently, only mathemagix is doing so. It integrates with TeXmacs
closely. For example, it has dynamic plots (and other dynamic objects).
Say, I have a plot of a function depending on some auxilliary parameters
somewhere in a TeXmacs window. I assign a new value to one of these
parameters, and the plot immediately changes, without the need to re-run a
plotting command. Such level of integration can be achieved in FriCAS,
too, but this requires further work. ioHooks are invaluable for
implementing interactions of FriCAS with external programs, such as
TeXmacs and others.
I'd say that the TeXmacs format is one of the most useful ones, because it
gives FriCAS an excellent GUI. Also the fortran format is useful for
anybody who plans to use derived formulas for an intensive numerical work
(it is still done in fortran in many cases). IBM script is, probably, not
used anymore.
I'd say that making the user experience with TeXmacs (GUI) / FriCAS
(engine) even better than it is today is very important. For example,
TeXmacs can be an improved replacement for HyperDoc, with a modern and
intuitive interface (HyperDoc definitely looks and feels old-fashioned).
This can be achieved by doing only a moderate amount of work. This is
especially important in today's world where programs without a nice and
convenient GUI are considered old-fashioned, and are often not even
considered by potential users.
Andrey
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