Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: mathaction

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

Arthur Norman <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Camm Maguire wrote:
> > Greetings, all!  The site looks great!  I just have one request -- it
> > should be made clear early on that reduce is not open source software.
> > It appears from their site that they are selling the source under some
> > circumstances however (cannot see where though).  It would be helpful
> > if someone could report on whether their conditions would allow
> > inspection of the source for use in spotting bugs in axiom.  Am also
> > wondering if standard lisp, as a 'subset', will run on gcl much as the
> > 'applicative common lisp' subset does in acl2.
> >
> > Take care,
> > --
> If you follow www.reduce-algebra.com you will find that a "personal"
> version of Reduce is available (for perhaps a limited range of
> platforms) and that comes without source, and there is a
> "professional" version that comes with source (and in some cases  full
> source of the Lisp use dto build it). And of course
> multiple-installation and site licenses are also available.
> Reduce has two distributors who use different Lisp systems, both
> conforming to "standard lisp". At one stage a mapping of that onto
> Common Lisp was available but that is no longer supported or
> available. One of the versions of Reduce is built on and comes with my

Thanks for the information!  Reduce does look nice and I wish it well
in the marketplace.  If and when it is ever judged that Reduce's
lifecycle as a commercial product has come to an end, I do hope that
the authors will consider following the example NAG has set with
axiom, and that hopefully sufficient advance notice will be given to
allow people to organize open support as seemlessly as possible.

> "CSL" Lisp system and when NAG distributed Axiom I had adjustments to
> that that supported enough of the common lisp-isms that Axiom built on
> it. To my mind the key featuures of what was done there were that (a)
> one compiled image file could then be run on almost any platform
> (windows, linux, lots of sorts of Unix) so the need for per-platform
> compilation of all that Lisp was removed. And platform-specific
> glitches and incompatibilities would be minimised. (b) at the time
> Axiom was notably a resource hog by the standard of workstations
> available and "CCL" (thing S=standard, C=common, L=lisp, c=Codemist)
> allowed it to run with a relatively modest footprint.
> 
> Note that some in the new Axiom world have declared use of CCL to be
> one of the worst mistakes anybody ever made wrt Axiom and that my Lisp
> is thus to be abhored.. so do not get too enthusiastic.
> 

Your lisp is great, and even more, your helpfulness and support.
IMHO, there are too many lisps for the good of the language -- I wish
I knew of a way we could all combine forces.

Take care,

>       Arthur
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah