Re: [Axiom-developer] APL, J, and Axiom documentation

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

root wrote:
> I had a 2D parser on my desk at IBM. Our Scratchpad group had an
> effort to do handwritten input. Maple had one also but I don't know
> what the outcome was. I gave a sample at ECCAD in Phila. If you ignore
> the handwritten portion of the problem it seems you could create a
> parser to handle 2D linear typewritten input. Thus a single program
> assignment statement such as:
>
>             b
>      a  = ------
>              t
>             p q
>
> Ideally it would be print/read equivalent to Axiom's Charybdis output.
> Ron Avitzur had a really nice, but small, subset of this.
> Sounds like a fantastic student project to me.

I'll have to go grubbing about in my collection of ancient history, but 
IIRC there was a language that did this -- 2D parsing -- on a 
Flexowriter in 1965. :)

Really -- I'm not making it up!

> I've had a small amount of correspondence with Guy Steele about
> whether Fortress can support Provisos natively but I've not actually
> seen the language up until now.
>
> I'm not sure what ability Fortress will have to handle Axiom-style
> types. They aren't required for Fortran and Steele seems to have taken
> Fortran as the target replacement language. I'm also not sure if it
> can handle the category/domain questions.

Everybody is waiting with bated breath for Fortress. About the only 
thing it has going for it in my humble opinion is the marketing weight 
of Sun. There are real languages that really exist now that will do 
everything I want as efficiently as possible. They are called Scheme, 
Forth, Ruby, Axiom, Maxima, Common Lisp, Fortran, C, Perl, R, ...

> As for funding Axiom from anywhere by anyone... sigh.  The only hope I
> see for funding is if
>
>   (a) Axiom is deeply documented,
>   (b) Computational Mathematics becomes its own department in many schools,
>   (c) Axiom gets picked up as the canonical teaching platform.

The thing is that Axiom *was* at one time funded -- it was a commercial 
product. It couldn't compete in its market place and now resides 
(mostly) in open source. Now there's Sage, which promises to give other 
commercial math packages a run for their money.