Re: [Axiom-developer] browser front end, statement of plans and progress

[Andrey G. Grozin]

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007, address@hidden wrote:
> "...TeXmacs can do everything hyperdoc does"? Really? Not that
> I'm aware of. Hyperdoc embeds images and can communicate commands
> to Axiom and then display the resulting images inline (and start
> up a separate process if you click on the image). I have no doubt
> that TeXmacs COULD do this but I do doubt that it is on anyone's
> desk to make this happen in the next year.
There is some mis-understanding here. TeXmacs can display inline graphics 
for quite some time, and interfaces to many computer algebra systems do 
exactly this. TeXmacs can send commands to external programs. No need to 
wait, all of this is available. So, I think, TeXmacs is just a better 
hyperdoc than hyperdoc.

> "...It is easy to output Axiom expressions as s-expressions, and to
> send them to TeXmacs, without losing any information about their
> internal structure and semantics...". This can't be done. The
> semantics of the parts of the expressions have machine-level
> pointers to domain data structures which point to other domain
> data structure which index into other domain data structures, etc.
> Once the pointer leaves the Axiom image it is meaningless and all
> of Axiom's meaning comes from the domain where the expression lives.
> Thus it is not possible to export an s-expression with all of its
> semantics intact.
Well, of course, the *full* semantics of an expression only exists within 
Axiom. But a straightforward s-expression can easily contain more 
semantics than LaTeX of display mathml. What is "a(b+c)", for example - a 
function with an argument or a product? These 2 cases should be typesetted 
slightly differently (and TeXmacs knows that).

I don't say that the current TeXmacs-Axiom interface is good, because it 
is not. Therefore, few people use it. On the other hand, the 
TeXmacs-maxima interface is much better, and the number of users is quite 
large (I know, because I get a lot of emails when a new version od maxima 
breaks this interface; this happens regularly :-( I think that a new and 
much better TeXmacs-Axiom interface can be produced by a fraction of 
efforts needed for other kinds of interfaces, which re-invent more weels. 
I started to do it some time ago (not recently, don't remember exactly 
when). I only needed a little help. I posted some questions to this list, 
and received 0 replies. Exactly 0. So I could not proceed :-(

An idea about graphics: why not use an existing powerful data 
visualisation system instead of the current graphics viewer? Something 
like ParaView, VisIt, or OpenDX. These systems are highly non-trivial, and 
it would be a shame to re-implement a small fraction of their 
functionality instead of just using them. And Axiom will just prepare data 
files for them. They are all free, and available on many platforms.

Andrey