Has anyone given thought for making Sage read Mathematica syntax? I've seen a recent video from William stating it is NOT an aim of Sage to be clone of any of the 4 M's - in contrast, Octave is a clone of MATLAB.
Whilst parsing Mathematica code is not an aim of Sage, I doubt many would are argue that it would be a useful addition if Sage could read Mathematica code, and do something useful with it. I could see several way one might attack such a problem. 1)) Use yacc/lex to create a C library, then call that from Sage. 2) Write the parser in Python. 3) Pass the input directly to ECL (Lisp interpreter) and do the parsing in Lisp. Personally I'd be most comfortable in using lex/yacc/C, less comfortable in Python and even less so in Lisp, as I don't have a clue about Lisp. But actually, the latter approach, using Lisp, which personally I'd be *least* comfortable with, might actually be the *most* sensible approach. Why? 1) Most computer algebra systems are based on some form of Lisp - including Mathematica I believe, so it can't be a bad choice. One might even argue Lisp might have been a better choice than Python than Sage, though there are far more Python programmers than Lisp programmers, so that's possibly not true. In fact, I think it's fair to sage having Python skills on ones CV is more worthwhile than Lisp skills. (flames for even considering not using Python to /dev/null). 2) I think there's a library interface to ECL, which could probably avoid the need for messing around with pexpect. Send the input directly to ECL. 3) There is also a paper describing a Mathematica parser in Lisp in a peer reviewed journal. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1089419.1089421 For those of us not affiliated with an academic institution and so have no access to a library (boy, do I miss that), a paper by the same name at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/lmath.ps is probably almost identical 4) The source code for that Mathematica parser is available. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/mma1.6/ whilst most obviously written for an old version of Mathematica, a few source files were updated in 2006, suggesting it probably works with semi-recent versions of Mathematica. In any case, Mathematica is reasonably backwards compatible. 5) The author of the Mathematica parser in Lisp is alive and kicking, and a reader of sage-devel. Getting Sage to read Mathematica and do useful things with it, should make an interesting project for a computer science student. Although I don't know much about this, I would be guess this would have to be an MSc project, not an undergraduate one as I doubt doing any of this would be trivial. Once such a parser existed which was usable from Sage, a mathematician could probably do useful things with it. Of course, I'm aware Sage has an interface to Mathematica, but that needs a Mathematica license to be of any use at all. Realistically, in my personal opinion, Sage will never have the combined functionality of MATLAB, Maple and Mathematica. In fact, I don't believe it will ever have the full functionality of any of those 3. (I also accept that Sage is far ahead of Mathematica in some areas such as number theory). On that basis, there's little point in worrying about a 100% complete implemention of a Mathematica parser. Has anyone got any comments? Dave -- 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
