Hi,
> Oh, that's terrible, why would a program need its own programming > language? Well, why not, think of all kinds of DSPs? I don't think there was any language suitable to express these very abstract algebraic structures we need for CA. And in some way, I doubt that there is such a language today, except, maybe, Haskell. (All the OO things like C++ or Python can be used to write algebraic code of course, but it will always be less concise.) But this is my personal conclusion. The SPAD language is indeed hard to learn but the ideas are very elegant and perfectly useful for its purpose. Actually, writing code in it is very difficult also because of the SPAD compiler which is not helpful at all in finding programming errors. > http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/standards/program/spad/syntax/index.htm Oh, forget about that. The much better source for information about SPAD is the "Aldor User Guide". Aldor is the SPAD successor and became free software in the last year. It is more clean and well defined but still similar enough in concept and structure. Anyway, I'd be surprised if there are more than 50 or 100 people worldwide being able to read and program in Aldor. (And I'd count myself as 0.5 at most.) > I think that having its own language, SPAD, is a big hindrance > to its development today. Maybe a bit, but I'm not too sure about that. Maxima is written in Lisp and the development there is extremely slow. > In any case I suggest to find someone who is practical with Axiom's > SPAD in order to see if parts of it can be copied into SymPy. Personally, I'd say that this is a waste of time. Reading the Axiom source may help to gain even better understanding of the math, but it would be much easier to just write the code anew. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
