I think that some of the suggestions here pretty much miss the mark. If you want to have Maxima do the same thing as Mathematica's Reduce program (and, by the way I think this would be good, especially since Mathematica's Reduce program seems to have been improved substantially so it is a store- house of neat things, in current Mma), then you should write a program that implements Reduce. Probably most easily done by adding to the Maxima code.
Patching together something that answers questions from Maxima, either in python, pexpect, or for that matter, lisp, doesn't seem to me to be as worthwhile. As for the CAD (cylindrical algebraic decomposition) stuff, Reduce has gone far beyond that. Having a program that does only CAD is not very useful in the general world of "solve" unless you are only interested in polynomials and in particular, CAD. So no trig, log, exp, etc. Implementing CAD and a good geometry data-base for assume, and writing a version of Reduce for Maxima and/or Sage -- sure. Someone should go ahead and design it in detail. Write a nice paper about it, perhaps. Then decide how to implement it, in Python/Sage or "Maxima language" or Lisp. One nice thing about the latter two choices is that it would improve "standalone" Maxima too. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
