C Y <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: | > C Y <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | > | > | Indeed. The Aldor documentation is not free at all, and any attempt to | > | define Aldor in a literate style would have to duplicate Aldor without | > | duplicating too closely its documentation - that's a real problem. | > | > I cannot parse this. Could you elaborate? | | Sorry, this seems to be an off week for me communication wise. If we | define and document properly a language like Aldor, we must include | descriptions of the behavior of the language. The problem with | specifying a language behavior is that the description cannot vary too | much from one description to another and still be defining the same | concepts. The problem of (for example) writing a document that | describes ANSI lisp without running into any copyright problems is very | difficult, because if you stray too far from the text of the | specification you run the risk of not defining the behavior you need to | define. And it would be even more difficult to avoid such a description | being a "derivative work" of the previous description.
OK, thanks for the explanation. Since I'm not in the business of cloning Aldor, I'm not sure how that affects Axiom. I don't see a point of cloning Aldor. I see great benefits in an improved SPAD. [...] | > You don't need a language to do *just* mathematics in Axiom. You also | > need a language to communicate with the world around. All major | > systems for computation mathematics have grown into that position. | > Don't get blindsighted. | | I would prefer to let the Lisp level handle the outside world as much as | possible. But you still need to specify what that does to a SPAD program. Just delegating to Lisp does not solve the fundamental problem. | What are you referring to by communication? Exporting | algorithms as Fortran code? Interacting with C libraries? File and | Data Input/Output APIs? All of that, including interfacing with nay reasonable language used in the computational science community -- that list goes beyond Fortran and C. -- Gaby _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
