On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 6:45 PM, Robert Dodier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Robert Bradshaw wrote: > >> On Aug 30, 2008, at 4:46 PM, Robert Dodier wrote: > >> > From the direction this discussion has taken I'm guessing that >> > nobody here is aware that selective evaluation is trivial in Lisp, >> > and Maxima. In both cases a single quote marks stuff that >> > isn't evaluated. > >> I actually did know that lisp has this feature. The real question is >> how to expose such a feature in a natural way in the Sage (Python) >> environment. > > FWICT there is not indeed any natural way to do it. It seems within > the realm of possibility to develop a superset of Python which has a > modified evaluation policy. Existing programs would act the same > in this hypothetical language, but there could be new constructs > (quoting and evaluating, unevaluated and partially-evaluated > expressions, maybe more) which extend the language. > >> Using Python has worked out very nice both for the UI >> and core library--I don't see this changing anytime soon. > > There are days when I want to use Python as the UI language; > it is a much stronger programming language than the existing > Maxima language. There is an implementation of Python in > Lisp, namely CLPython. I have toyed with the idea of using > CLPython as the UI language for Maxima. > >> And as beautiful lisp is as a language, it seems even Maxima >> decided that it wasn't suited for the front end of a CAS. > > The Maxima language has the same code = data principle as in Lisp. > That's much more important than parenthesis or the lack of them.
Ok. I would be really interested what things you don't like on Mathematica. It seems to me it is also quite lisp like, no? So what things do they have wrong? So that we can learn from it. Ondrej --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
