RE: [Axiom-developer] Re: literate programming pamphlet files forMathAction

[Bill Page]

William,

I greatly appreciate your discussion of hyperdoc. I think you are
quite right to observe that open axiom is at a serious disadvantage
because of the lack of this part of the former commercial product.

On Saturday, October 02, 2004 3:14 AM William Sit wrote:
> 
> ... 
> 
>     I believe Bob Sutor designed (or patched in) this syntax 
> when he wrote the Book so he could simply extract these and
> put them into both hyperdoc and the Axiom Book. It's too bad
> that not all spad source provided these examples (what
> Tim may have called "testcase"). I don't know if the full 
> code for hyperdoc is available as open-source, but if so,
> the grammar of documentation in spad files can be extracted,
> and it would be a big waste to throw it away and not built
> upon it.

Yes I think the full code for hyperdoc is (or will be) available
as open source but it has not yet been ported to use a modern
graphical user interface. That is a big job even for someone
fully familiar with gui programming.

We did have some previous discussion of this. For references
see:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=hyperdoc&submit=Search
%21&idxname=axiom-developer&max=10&result=normal&sort=score

In particular see

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-07/msg00068.html

for much of that documentation.

> 
> So I would suggest that reviving hyperdoc should be one of the
> highest priorities and after that, add examples and better 
> commentaries to the spad source. The final design of pamphlet
> files (at least the code segment portions) can then be built upon
> the experience with hyperdoc from more people. Hyperdoc can then
> be expanded (more topics are included in basic commands), improved
> (for example, display the mathematics contained in the pamphlet/
> LaTeX source), or morphed into a browser plug-in, or even a web-based
> version like that in MathAction.
>

The pamphlet files now contain all of the spad source code (including
all comments). Editing the commentaries for xxx.spad now means editing
the associated xxx.spad.pamphlet file. The code part of these files
is automatically extracted and used during the Axiom build process.

I notice that in

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-10/msg00071.html

Mike Dewar wrote:

> The only problem I can envisage is that without sman you cannot
> use the unix graphics or browser (hyperdoc will work on its own
> provided it doesn't need to communicate with the running Axiom
> interpreter).  For our own TeX-based interface on Windows we
> dispensed with sman completely and had everything running
> smoothly through TechExplorer except for the graphics which
> needed an external program to display (SceneViewer, an OpenGL
> renderer which we licensed from Template Graphics Software).

Since the functionality of TechExplorer is not so different from
what is possible under LatexWiki, Mike's comment makes me feel
optimistic that it would be possible to implement a large part
of hyperdoc in MathAction.

Regards,
Bill Page.