[Axiom-developer] Re: Reduce does gnuplot

[Bob McElrath]

Bill Page address@hidden wrote:
> Tim,
> 
> I have an illustration here
> 
>   http://test.axiom-developer.org/Members/billpage/ReduceTest1

Wow that's really nice.

> I think it should be quite easy (in principle) to call
> gnuplot from Axiom. I wonder if anyone had done that before?

I thought axiom had its own plotting system that was in the process of
being integrated?

I have a lot of changes to pull from your repo!  ;)

Regarding the page types, I will merge all your code into a single
PageType (and a single file).  I'll give you warning before I do that,
since it will be a disruptive change.  I'm at a conference now, so it
will take me a while before I have time to do this.

I was thinking today to have a admin-confgurable CPU limit.  One could
easily create a denial-of-service attack against a math-enabled wiki by
giving it a hard problem, sucking all CPU.  For example, give the
axiom/reduce 10s to produce an answer, otherwise kill it and give the
user an error.  At worst this time limit should be the same as the HTTP
timeout (which is usually 60s - 360s), after which the browser gives up
on the server and the user won't get his answer anyway.

For a site that will see many computations, it might be worthwhile to
maintain an synchronous connection to a running axiom/reduce process.

If it is desirable to have long-running computations, it would be useful
to create a page saying "computing..." and fill in the result when it is
done.  This might require some heavy(-ier) retooling of zwiki.

BTW I just discovered this gem on your site:

    When you are entering Axiom commands you can use the _ to write
    variables names that begin with a \ . Such names will be interpreted
    as LaTeX? symbols. It is also possible to construct super- and
    subscripted names this way.

I have been DYING for this feature, for YEARS.

Cheers,
Bob McElrath [Univ. of California at Davis, Department of Physics]
    
    It is unpatriotic to question the Kleptocracy.

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