Re: [Jacal-discuss] concerning google summer of code 2010

[Aubrey Jaffer]

 | Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:53 +0200
 | From: Vytautas Jancauskas <address@hidden>
 | 
 | Hi I am a masters student of computer science who is hoping to
 | participate in Google's summer of code this year.  I use symbolic
 | algebra packages for my studies and in spare time alot (Maple and
 | Maxima) and I have quite decent experience programming in Common
 | Lisp and Scheme so I thought this project is right up my alley when
 | I saw it on the list.

JACAL supports many of Maxima's commands.

 | I have compiled and ran jacal.  I am writing to ask wether you have
 | some pointers for further activity towards participation in the
 | development.  I know some "mentoring organizations" really like
 | when you do some work on the project before submitting an
 | application so I am wondering wether you might have some "chores"
 | to do?

That is not my model.  But do get the development version of JACAL;
some annoying problems have been fixed.

 | Also I am hoping to discuss a possible theme for my work.  Can you
 | describe them in more detail?  Thanks in advance!

The JACAL home page <http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/JACAL> lists
three opportunities with links to relevant stuff:

* Code Decomposition of Algebraic Functions
  <http://www.google.com/search?q=%22decomposition+of+algebraic+functions%22>
  Decomposition and factoring are two different ways of destructuring
  functions (expressions).

* Code Polynomial Interpolation
  <http://www.google.com/search?q=%22polynomial+interpolation%22>
  `interpol' in Maxima.

* Add support for Mathematical Markup Language
  <http://www.w3.org/Math/>
  MML output should be straightforward to write.  I don't know whether
  the SLIB precedence-parse (used for other input syntaxes) or an XML
  parser would be better for MML input.

I chose these because they are self-contained, not requiring extensive
knowledge of all of JACAL's internals.

If you can read other people's (rather messy) code, more ambitious
would be to extract the Groebner-Basis code from
<http://downloads.sourceforge.net/math-linux/scheme-dir.tar.bz2> by
"naruto canada" <address@hidden>.
The comp.lang.scheme thread announcing this code was:
<http://groups.google.co.jp/group/comp.lang.scheme/browse_thread/thread/04001a046edae5cd/ae7d0af6d42b5dca?lnk=raot>