Ralf, Waldek, Andrey,
Thank you for the useful information, I have added it to the document:
http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/standards/program/mycode/output/
So here is the $64000 question ... take your time ... dramatic pause ...
Is this a worthwhile project and would you like me to work on it?
You probably think that, since this is an open source project, as I am
interested in it I should just start coding, see what happens and stop
wasting my time with documentation and requirements.
However the thing about this project is that it is a big chunk of work
requiring a re-write of ALL the formatters, OutputForm and
i-output.boot. I don't think it is possible to change some formatters
and not others, so the whole thing would have to be changed in one
single release. Therefore I would be discouraged if I did a lot of work
on it and then you chose not to use it. Of course I don't expect a
guarantee that you would use any of my code, but it would be nice to
have a strong commitment, even if there were some dangers in the first
release and some interfaces might get broken.
I don't think I have the skills to work on fortran, teXmacs and efricas,
I would not even know how to test such interfaces, so someone else would
have to work on these.
What I could do for fortran and teXmacs is to provide skeleton
formatters which output plain unformatted text and well documented hooks
for someone else to add the formatting details.
There are some things that would help me. I always have problems doing a
full make of FriCAS as you can see here:
http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/standards/program/fricas/compiling/
I did once manage to build it using CLisp but it was problematic. So if
you are planning to do a new release of FriCAS anytime soon it would
really help if you could add a new SPAD package with a function
output(domain:Type) then change everything that calls output in
'i-output.boot' to call the SPAD code instead, which would then call the
output$Lisp. This extra indirection, via SPAD, would mean that I could
work purely by modifying the SPAD code.
I am happy to write SPAD code and to reverse engineer to SPAD by tracing
through the existing Lisp and boot code (perhaps 'happy' is not quite
the right word, concerning boot code, but you probably know what I mean).
It would be helpful, although not essential, if there is anything you
could do to provide some sort of System command, directly in SPAD, to
get the system level data set by such things as digits(n),
outputFloating(), outputFixed(), outputGeneral(), ')set output', ')set
expose',')set fortran' and so on. If not, I can still use the Lisp calls
for now. It would just be nice to get rid of all lisp and associated
pretends.
On 17/03/14 22:31, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
Use of OutputForm in SExpression can be easily removed:
related functions are only used in genufact.spad and
fortran.spad. Deeper problem is that fortran.spad
apparently assumes that OutputForm = SExpression and
passes values to Boot code with little regard to types.
Note that defining something like OutputForm2 will help
only a little, because code in fortran.spad is supposed
to work on OutputForm, so you would need to keep
all current mess supporting OutputForm.
I really would NOT be willing to do this. The whole point is to get rid
of the mess, not replace one mess with another mess. I think we can only
move forward when we are building on solid, concise, well-typed,
well-documented code.
I realise that Fortran is still used for industrial scale number
crunching but I don't get the impression that numerical computing is a
strong area for FriCAS? Are the people doing this sort of computing (and
the companies that support them like The Numerical ALgorithms Group Ltd)
really using FriCAS? Although there is a theoretical possibility that
people are using the fortran interface are you sure there are any real
users? Would you really be willing to put the massive amount of work in,
at the cost of future development, just to support fortran? I wouldn't.
I hope this doesn't all sound a bit presumptuous of me, perhaps you
don't want me to do any of this?
Martin
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