RE: [Axiom-developer] sbcl and Axiom

[Page, Bill]

On Wednesday, July 26, 2006 11:54 AM C Y wrote: 

> --- Bill Page wrote:
> ... 
> > Time spent converting the existing Lisp code and the generated
> > Lisp code to conform to the common lisp standard is obviously
> > time well spent, as are efforts to port Axiom to other lisp
> > platforms besides GCL. But seems really unfortunate to me that
> > we are still in the situation where we have only one active
> > Axiom developer working in Lisp (Tim Daly).
> 
> Agreed. But moving the generated Lisp code to ANSI is only of
> use if one never plans to generate the code again.

What I meant to write what modifying the programs that generate
lisp code so that they generate ANSI common lisp compliant code.

> It seems this is indeed the plan for the boot level code.
> However, the SPAD compiler will have to be adjusted to output
> ANSI lisp, unless we get a Free aldor first.

Agreed, however I think it should be done asap anyway.

> If there is overlap between the SPAD abilities and the BOOT
> abilities, perhaps a "tweaked-to-ANSI" boot compiler would be
> of some user after all for patching the SPAD code.

I don't see any point since as you originally surmised,
there is a complete overlap between the BOOT compiler and
the SPAD compiler - all we need is the bootstrapped SPAD
compiler.

> ... 
> > Even new and innovative projects like Sage:
> > 
> > http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/
> > 
> >   (Thanks for the reference Frédéric Lehobey.)
> > 
> > have choosen to implement an interface to Maxima first
> > before seriously considering Axiom.
> 

I found some emails on the Sage website where one of the
authors briefly considered Axiom but decided on Maxima
because it already ran on Clisp and he anticipated (quite
correctly!) that Maxima would be easier to build on many
different platforms.

BTW, Sage already has a Javascript/AJAX web-based notebook
interface and their code is fully available under GPL. It
even includes LaTeX and graphics (gnuplot) output. If
someone is thinking of extending Tim Daly's work on this
sort of user interface for Axiom, I think Sage would be a
great place to look first.

Regards,
Bill Page.