[Axiom-developer] freeing Aldor (was: closing bug reports)

[Page, Bill]

Martin, 

On Friday, October 27, 2006 4:42 PM you wrote:
> ... 
> BTW, I think that issuetracker really needs one improvement: 
> we need to be able to run old versions of axiom there. Many
> many of the bug reports are strange to read, because the
> examples provided don't fail anymore.
>

Agreed. I have not found any easy way to do this nor enough
time to do the necessary programming.
 
> Furthermore, it's high time to have something like Christian 
> Aistleitners aldorunit package for axiom.
>

Any kind of unit testing for Axiom would be a big improvement.
Save for example, makes extensive use of DocTest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctest
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-doctest.html

Both Aldor and SPAD have the equivalent of "docstrings" so
this idea could be easily ported. (Perhaps doctest is similar
to what aldorunit does?

> And of course, it's high time for a free aldor compiler, and 
> for dependent types in axiom. But I guess, all that won't
> happen in the near future.
> 
> I'm quite depressed, I must confess.
>

Yes, me too. But sometimes it is possible to use such feelings
as a source of motivation...

Recently I stumbled across the Aldor credits web page again
where I re-read:

http://www.aldor.org/credits.html

"Aldor.org was formed as an organization involving NAG and the
principal supporters of Aldor to distribute it freely."

One thing that I think most of us can agree on is that so far
Aldor.org has not really lived up to stated purpose. :-(

Another thing I noticed was the rather impressive list of names
associated with Aldor. Some of these people we know very well
and some of them have actually added there names to the

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/FreeAldor#bottom

petition (which now has nearly 50 names!).

Except for those people whom we can no longer possibly contact
because they are no with us, I was thinking in terms of making
a serious effort to contact as many of these people as possible
and ask them to lend their support to making Aldor open source.
If we can we can get the support of even a few of these people,
I think it would necessarily carry some weight with Aldor.org.

Names from the Aldor credits page:

Richard D. Jenks
Robert S. Sutor
Barry M. Trager
Stephen Watt (IBM, INRIA, and U Western Ontario)
Florian Bundshuh
William Burge
James Davenport
Marc Gaëtano
Michael Monagan
Scott Morrison
Simon Robinson
Gerald Baumgartner
Peter Broadbery
Samuel Dooley
Teresa Gomez Diaz
Stephen Gortler
Pietro Iglio
Jonathan Steinbach
Knut Wolf
Dave Bayer (Columbia U)
Manuel Bronstein (ETH Zurich)
Ronnie Brown (University of Wales, Bangor)
Robert Corless (U Western Ontario and IBM)
Tim Daly (IBM)
Mike Dewar (NAG)
Patrizia Gianni (U Pisa and IBM)
Johannes Grabmeier (IBM)
Hans-Gert Gräbe (University of Leipzig)
Tony Kennedy (Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, Florida State U)
Larry Lambe (IBM)
Mike Richardson (NAG)
Philip Santas (ETH Zurich)
Barry Trager (IBM)
Themos Tsikas (NAG)
Brian Ford (NAG)
Steve Hague (NAG)
Bill Pulleyblank (IBM)
Marshall Schor (IBM)
Shmuel Winograd (IBM)
Yannis Chicha (U Western Ontario)
Florence Defaix (U Western Ontario)
Sam Dooley (IBM)
Martin Dunstan (NAG)
Marc Gaëtano (INRIA)
Teresa Gomez-Diaz (NAG)
Vilya Harvey (NAG)
Peter Huerter (U Western Ontario)
Marc Moreno Maza (NAG and U Lille I)
Manuel Bronstein  (ETH Zurich and INRIA)
James Davenport (U Bath)
Martin Dunstan (University of St Andrews)
Robert Edwards (SCRI Florida State U)
Tom Kelsey (University of St Andrews)
Tony Kennedy (SCRI Florida State U)
Ralf Hemmecke (U Linz)
Niklaus Mannhart (ETH Zurich)
Simon Thompson (U Kent)
and Saul Youssef (SCRI Florida State U)
Tom Ashby
Greg Collins
Laurentiu Dragan
Bálint Joó
Bill Naylor
Cosmin Oancea

--------

No doubt many of the organizations affliated to these names
will be far out of date. But in some cases current Axiom users
and developers may still be on personal contact with their
former colleagues. In other cases it may be able to find a
more up to date affiliated via the web.

Anyway, if someone would like to volunteer to lead an effort to
contact these people formerly (and some currently) associated
with Aldor, I think that would be much better than just remaining
depressed. :-)

Cheers,
Bill Page.