On 07/22/2014 12:00 AM, Waldek Hebisch wrote: > 1) I feel that current way of formatting requires too much > work for casual use. It is OK for library, but a lot > of programs (especialy .input files) is run-once, and > we need something easier. > 2) output$OutputPackage is a step towards easier output > formatting, but IMO we need to do much more. > 3) I am not sure how far we should go with formatting > capabilities (in particular, if OutputForm is supposed > to contain yet another page description langage), but > _if_ we include such things like 'center' then all > formatters should make best effort to implement it. > 4) I feel that we need examples of various ways of generating > output in the manual. In particular we need example > of 'output$OutputPackage'. I would avoid it in Pascal > example, because of 'center' problem.
I hope you got me right. I was not arguing against output$OutputPackage, but rather against promoting it in the book. Looking at Aldor again... There is no OutputForm. First I had the impression, that everything should be done as stdout << "blah" << someObject << newline but that's only the first impression. libalgebra in Aldor also has ExpressionTree and nearly every domain knows how to coerce to ExpressionTree. In some way, It's like OutputForm and can also be used like this, since there is a function <<: (TextWriter, ExpressionTree) -> TextWriter Well, that's one-dimensional output, but basically the same idea as with OutputForm. Eventually, OutputForm might disappear and be replaced by a more general expression tree structure. That structure shouldn't know much about center or such, but rather just be an expression tree (which is basically what all the other CAS have). From that there should be formatters into TeX, MathML, etc. These formatters might return just lists of strings. Another package then takes these strings and puts them onto a certain stream (file or screen). It's a long way to go. At the moment I'm not in favour of changing more than I already did during my work on the book. ad 1) output$OutputPackage and print: OutputForm -> Void is already there. I'm using it myself sometimes and don't think it should go away. ad 2) ad 3) I'm in favour of some expression format that can be shown nicely and also be cut&paste back as input. ad 4) Yes, we need more tutorials. Honestly, I wouldn't change the old Axiom book too much but rather write something new. Keeping the old book and adapting for the changes in FriCAS would be enough for my taste, but there can be other tutorials. One for interactive use, one for learning to program in SPAD etc. etc. Ralf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
