[Axiom-developer] MathMLFormat and serv.c

[Bill Page]

Axiom Developers;

Without much fanfare, Arthur Ralfs has contributed the following
important package for Axiom:

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/MathMLFormat

See also the email thread:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2007-02/msg00149.html

The package includes several patchs which integrates MathML
into Axiom so that it can be invoked with just a one command:

  )set output mathml on

I think we should consider including this in the next release
of Axiom.

I was also very interested to see a small C program which Ralf
provides with this package to enable access to Axiom from a
browser. He says:

> I have written a few files to enable automatic viewing in
> Firefox. The file serv.c is a wrapper for starting and
> communicating with Axiom.

...

The initial comments of 'serv.c' include:

/*
 * This software is to enable displaying Axiom output on the
 * Firefox web browser.  I got started on it by looking at
 * tm_axiom.c by Andrey Grozin.
 * As such it falls under the GNU general public license and
 * comes WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY WHATSOEVER.
 * COPYRIGHT : (C) 2006 Arthur C. Ralfs
*/
/*
 * The purpose of this program is to start up axiom and connect
 * to it with a pair of pipes, axcom.axin and axcom.axout, and
 * then setup a socket to listen for commands.
*/

The reason this seems especially interesting is because of the
recent work by Martin to implement a simple web server inside
Axiom itself with no extermal process.

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandBoxHyperDocReplacement

I think it might be a simple matter to use this approach with
Ralf's example code without having to use PHP and Apache.

Alternately, 'serv.c' might be of some interest for other
applications that interface with Axiom.

Is there anyone else on this list who is interested in
applications of MathML in Axiom?

Regards,
Bill Page.