On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Bill Page <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Ondrej Certik wrote: >> >> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 5:10 PM, Bill Page wrote: >>> ... >>> Anyway, I think there is a lot of potential for improvement in the >>> existing 'axiom.py' interface even without considering how to >>> solve the problem of an efficient application program interface. >>> One thing that I miss a lot when using Axiom from the Sage >>> notebook is the ability to embed Spad code and compile it. This >>> should be quite straightforward to add to 'axiom.py'. >>> >>> I would be glad to work with anyone else interested in improving >>> the Axiom/FriCAS interface for Sage. >> >> In the long term there should be a way to call lisp from C or >> Python directly. Then all the problems above could be solved >> much more easily. If the only way of interacting with lisp is over a >> pexpect interface, then something is very wrong. >> > > I agree that an efficient API is desirable - especially if some > external program is to be called very often to perform some small > operation that is part of some larger calculation. That certainly is > the case for the way Sage uses Maxima now. In this case the lack of an > efficient API is a big limitation. But I do not see how this is the > case with Axiom. It is not clear to me that any of "the problems above > could be solved much more easily" given such an API. From my point of > view the problems are at a different conceptual level.
Ok, I thought it would help at least. > > There is supposed to be an "easy" way to call programs compiled with > ECL from C (and thus via some suitable wrapper from Python or from > Cython), but I have yet to see this demonstrated. Even in this case > there remains the problem of conversion of data structures which is > likely to add back some (hopefully small part) of the overhead that > you removed by eliminating pexpect. Just like with sympy or ginac. Just holding the pointer to the expression in ginac or sympy. If you know what I mean. Maxima and axiom are basically out of the game, because of this. I'd like to compare the symbolics engines on a fair basis, so calling them over pexpect is not the way. I think if any program wants to be successful, it's a good idea to figure out how to call it from C without (much) overhead. Imho. 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-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
