Hi, I was involved for a while in the Yacas project (and I've actually wrote some code for it, for example the code for computing the cyclotomic polynomials or for Gaussian integer factorization).
Your are right about in that Yacas is meant to be used as an interpreter (in fact, is a lisp interpreter) rather than a C library (it actually has a plug-in mechanism for using C libraries, for example gsl) I think that the main goal of yacas is simplicity, is quite easy to use, and of small size. The main drawback sthat I've found are * Yacas is not strongly typed. This sometimes means that the computations may give wrong results (as some rules .are valid for one type of objects and not for others) * The representation of everything as expressions makes computations slow (for example, when doing computations with polynomials) Even though Yacas is a free software project, and it indeed has compatible goals with Sage, I wouldn't recommend incorporating it into Sage, since I don't think that Yacas can do something that Sage can't, and also the implementations of every algorithm in Yacas seems to be much slower that the ones in Sage (as Yacas mainly uses lisp code whereas Sage uses C/C++ libraries). The codebase of Yacas could be useful to learn how to do something, indeed Yacas comes with useful documentation of algorithms, and Yacas code tends to be easy to read. But I would suggest to re-implement anything that could be useful in Sage. Pablo On 8/11/07, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 8/11/07, znmeb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Has anyone considered adding Yacas to Sage? > > It comes up every once in a while. Nobody has made any attempt > to actually include it in SAGE yet though. What does it do > that SAGE doesn't already do? My impression is that it's integration > capabilities are less sufficient than Maxima's. Also, my impression > is that yacas is meant to be used via an interpreter, rather than > as a C++ library. > > > They just released version > > 1.1.0, and have an ambitious road map that seems at least > > philosophically compatible with Sage. See > > > > http://yacas.sf.net/ > > > > and > > > > http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=F0A91E14-1B68-435F-93A9-313ECF8400AF%40xs4all.nl&forum_name=yacas-devel > > > > The email linked there is an interesting read. I guess what I found > most striking about it was the lack of discussion or desire for feedback > on the description of the direction in which yacas would go. (Maybe there > aren't many developers, or the discussion was private?) > > I would be very happy to be very enthusiastic about yacas, but I'm not > based on the very little I know so far. It would > be great if somebody could write to me or to this list explaining > the point of yacas and how yacas could be helpful for SAGE. > Thanks! E.g., does yacas do anything in particular very very very > quickly? Does it implement algorithms not in SAGE already? > How could it help with SAGE's main goal, which is to be a clean > unified well structured mathematical software system that is a viable > alternative to Mathematica, Maple, Magma, and MATLAB? > > -- William > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
